It’s a back and forth that engaged many of the film blogosphere’s biggest writers on Friday night in Twitter conversation.
It started with Latino Review reporting that Benicio Del Toro will be playing Khan Noonien Singh in J.J. Abrams’ upcoming sequel to “Star Trek.” LR’s has a very strong track record with this sort of thing so this is more than a blog’s idle speculation.
There’s been a lot of speculation of Khan’s involvement in this alternate universe Trek, though many aren’t sure how Khan would now fit into this universe – how would the events in the original series episode “Space Seed” be taken into account for example.
With word the other day that del Toro is playing a pre-existing character from Trek lore, naturally the speculation linked del Toro and Khan.
A few hours later though came a follow up report in which Abrams was asked about the scoop directly by HitFix. His response was short and unequivocal – “Not true.”
So if del Toro isn’t playing Khan, the question becomes what other bad guy will he be.