Just when all the hype had seemed to quieten down concerning the identity of Benedict Cumberbatch’s character, Simon Pegg has come out and denied that Khan will be the villain in Star Trek 2 .
Earlier this month TrekMovie claimed to have received confirmation that Cumberbatch would be playing the intergalactic tyrant, Khan Noonien Singh, but Pegg has subsequently dismissed that as pure speculation.
“It’s not Khan,” reveals Pegg. “That’s a myth. Everyone’s saying it is, but it’s not. I think people just want to have a scoop. It annoys me – it’s beyond the point to just ferret around for spoilers all the time to try to be the first to break them.”
That sounds pretty conclusive to us. However, rather than worrying about the identity of the villain, Pegg seems more concerned about the pressure of living up to the first film.
“This time we had the benefit of being able to hit the ground running,” he explains. “We spent some time in the first one re-establishing the characters. Now we have a fully set-up group of people that we can just get on with straight away. So it ups the ante slightly, and we’ve all had more to do.”
“It’s totally incumbent on us to not drop the ball,” he continues. “It would be a disaster if it wasn’t as good as – or better than – the first one.” Star Trek 2 opens in the UK on 17 May 2013.