Leonard Nimoy isn’t a stranger to television. He’s crafted one of the most iconic characters in the history of science fiction in Spock from STAR TREK. Obviously that same character carried over to the films – most recently even in the re-imagining of STAR TREK on the big screen.




But after STAR TREK’s demise, Nimoy went on to yet another fan-favorite series playing Paris in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

But he isn’t shying away from getting involved in yet another fan favorite in FRINGE – a series where he made his debut in the first season finale as the mysterious William Bell, a character living in an alternate universe.

Nimoy said what attracted him to doing the show was the creators. “J.J. Abrams, Bob Orci, and Alex Kurtzman, who I worked with on the STAR TREK movie, I admire their talent and the work that they do,” says Nimoy. “The series is at the very least to say intriguing. The character was somewhat of a blank slate, but we began talking about it and, therefore, [I was] attracted because there’s an opportunity to build an interesting and unpredictable character. I’m enjoying it a lot.”


Nimoy’s character of William Bell returns on tonight’s episode of FRINGE, where he helps Olivia (played by Anna Torv) discover the missing pieces to her memory after traveling back to her own universe from Bell’s.

Nimoy gave us a bit of what to expect from “Momentum Deferred” airing on Fox at 9 p.m. “In the episode tomorrow night, the scene in between myself and Olivia, I think we will learn a lot more than we have known in the past about what their relationship is all about and what William Bell’s intentions are, or at least we will be told what his intentions are,” Nimoy says. “We’re not really quite sure that everything that he says is accurate or true.”

And Nimoy isn’t shy either about explaining who Bell is and why he’s in the alternate universe. “William Bell is sort of a ‘master of the universe,’ a brilliant man, very wealthy man, very powerful,” he says. “We’ll find out a lot more about him in future episodes.”

One of the major moments from season one was the revelation that Peter Bishop (played by Joshua Jackson) was not the Peter of this universe but of the alternate universe that Walter (played by John Noble) had gone to the other universe to retrieve after his Peter died. That implies there is a second Walter as well. Does that also mean there are two William Bells?

Nimoy is coy in his answer. “I don’t think I can really answer that question very specifically right now,” he says. “I think the most important thing is that tomorrow night we will get a sense of what his relationship is with Olivia. It’s very intriguing and very intense moments that take place tomorrow night, and the rest remains to be seen. I’m expecting that I probably will be going back to work for them before too much longer.”