Farewell Linlithgow, new Star Trek star Pegg beams Scotty to Glasgow

Published on Saturday 25 April 2009 20:00

STAR Trek's Scotty is officially a working class Glaswegian boy, the actor who plays the role has revealed.

Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty in the latest film, has said his portrayal of the cult hero is of a physics genius from Glasgow, rather than from Linlithgow or Aberdeen as the character was thought to have originated.

Pegg, who has previously starred in Spaced and Shaun Of The Dead, was asked to play the role by director JJ Abrams following the death of the original Scotty James Doohan four years ago.

Star Trek, released on May 8, is about the crew of the USS Enterprise at the beginning of their Starfleet careers. Pegg said his wife was from Glasgow and wanted the character Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott to be from the area so he made the character a working class Glaswegian like his father-in-law.

In an interview with Scotland on Sunday he said: "You can't play James Doohan – that would be disrespectful to James Doohan and the character – so I decided to start from scratch and play a Scottish physics genius.

"My wife Maureen is from Glasgow and she was determined that Scotty would be West Coast, but I think he's from Linlithgow historically, so I started out a bit east coast and I was told to bring it further west because Scotty is a bit of a brawler. And my father-in-law is a working class Glaswegian boy... and, in the end so is Scotty."

Pegg's revelations will come as a blow to both Linlithgow and Aberdeen which have been embroiled in a war over which is the true birthplace of the USS Enterprise's Chief Engineer.

Linlithgow has insisted that according to Star Trek folklore, Scotty was born in the town on June 28, 2222, and his parents still live there.

At one point town officials contacted Doohan's son in Los Angeles to confirm the claim. However, Scotty's own claims to have once been an "old Aberdeen pub-crawler" prompted the city to boast of its own links to the cult series.

Doohan, who was Canadian, gave the character a Scottish accent because he believed Scots made the best engineers.