Two new reports claim that William Shatner has heard that Matt Damon may play Captain Kirk in J.J. Abrams' planned eleventh Star Trek feature film and quote Shatner as saying that he would like to be involved himself.

In an article in The Toronto Star on Shatner's new Kirk novel, Captain's Glory, which finds Kirk and Picard fighting on opposite sides of a Federation-wide battle, Shatner said of the upcoming movie, "I'd heard a rumour that Matt Damon was signed [to play Kirk], but we don't know if he is signed. I know nothing."

Nor did Shatner know whether it was true that the Abrams film will center on Kirk and Spock in their youth: "I don't know about that." But if Abrams were to ask Shatner to be involved, the actor quickly said, "Oh yeah...I would love to do it."

CinemaBlend reported that Shatner had made similar comments on the TV entertainment show Extra last weekend. "Of course, the fact that he's sitting there waiting to be asked probably means fairly definitely that the great Shat doesn't figure into Abrams' franchise jump-starting plans. Still, can't he get a cameo?" wondered CinemaBlend's Josh Tyler.

Shatner said that he wrote the new book in part because he could not let the 40th anniversary of Star Trek pass without marking it somehow. "With the ending, the cancellation of the last television series, the audience for Star Trek has taken a step backwards," Shatner told The Toronto Star. "I prefer to use that analogy rather than say the audience is dying because I think people are waiting for the next Star Trek entity."

Shatner had expressed interest in reprising Kirk on Star Trek: Enterprise before that series' cancellation, but negotiations reportedly broke down because Shatner's salary demands were higher than UPN was willing to pay (story).

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