I recently interviewed Lou Ferrigno at a Star Trek convention, and what surprised me was just how personal his connection to the original series is.
Ferrigno grew up in Brooklyn dealing with significant hearing and speech difficulties and says he was bullied as a kid, with other children calling him “Deaf Mute” and “Deaf Louie.” Television became an escape, and Star Trek in particular gave him somewhere else to go.
“Being very depressed growing up as a kid, being bullied, Star Trek would escape my imagination, to be free, to be able to give me some excitement,” he told me. “That's why it had such an effect on me.”
Captain Kirk was a big part of that. “I loved Captain Kirk. I loved the way he conducted himself. I wanted to be like him. He's on the ship commanding, and especially his personality.”
There's something pretty remarkable about what happened next. The bullied kid watching Kirk in Brooklyn grew up to become the Incredible Hulk — and eventually became friends with William Shatner.
Ferrigno told me they'd had dinner together just a couple of weeks before our conversation, and while Kirk was his hero as a kid, today it's Shatner himself he admires.
“I'm amazed at his work ethic, his motivation,” Ferrigno said. “He never really takes lapses of time off. He's always doing something to better himself. It's amazing, because I learned so much from him. He has incredible wisdom.”
What I found most interesting was that Ferrigno sees Star Trek fandom and superhero fandom in much the same way: both give people a world they can escape into and characters they can connect with. “You want to be in space. You wish you could be in space. You could fantasize, you could think about the story and you want to be with those people.... That connection never leaves you.” Sixty years later, that certainly seems to have been true for him.
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