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It’s a natural instinct for actors to put their own spin on iconic characters, even reinvent them.

But Karl Urban says he was a little torn about how to interpret Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy in the Star Trek reboot, a role played with wonderful crankiness by the late Deforest Kelley.

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“It was quite a nerve-wracking experience because obviously I have a long term appreciation and affection for Star Trek,” said the New Zealand actor Saturday afternoon at the Stampede Corral during the Calgary Expo. “It was one of the TV shows I watched as a kid. I had such a great respect for what those guys did. When we shot the first film, we didn’t have a mandate to deliver some sort of carbon copy of what had come before, it was really just make the character your own. For me, though, I felt as a long-time fan of the show, if I was to go into the cinema and see a McCoy that wasn’t intrinsically somehow bearing a resemblance, if not the spirit and manner, to the original, I would probably have felt let down. To me it was really important to think about what the late-great Deforest had done and really get the essence of that and present what a younger version would be.”