Given the intense levels of fandom actor William Shatner inspires, it is not easy to find factoids about the man that have not already been widely revealed. His is hardly an unexamined life. There’s the autobiography (Up Till Now: The Autobiography), more than one self-referencing documentary (Get a Life! and The Captains, both of which he directed, and How William Shatner Changed the World), and, most recently, a one-man show (Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It) that all offers insight into his life and career.

So, in honour of Shatner’s newest role as Friday’s parade marshal of the Stampede Parade, we’ve decided to boldly travel to the far reaches of the Internet (and Wikipedia) to fish out some fun facts about the man who played James Tiberius Kirk.

1. Shatner on stage

Before William Shatner was flying around the galaxy on the Starship Enterprise, he was a theatre actor who got his start trodding the boards at the renowned Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1954. He landed mostly small roles until Christopher Plummer had to bow out from Henry V one night in 1956 due to a troublesome kidney stone. Shatner was his understudy and, according to Plummer’s autobiography In Spite of Myself, a star was born: “Later, over coffee in the canteen, someone told me Bill Shatner had scored full marks as Henry,” Plummer wrote. “Ignoring all my moves, he had made sure he did everything I didn’t do — stood up where I had sat down, lay down where I had stood up. He refused to copy — he was original to the last. I knew then that the SOB was going to be a ‘star.’” Shatner made his Broadway debut that same year in Tamburlaine the Great and followed it with productions of A Shot in the Dark and The World of Suzie Wong. Fifty years later, he returned to Broadway for Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It. Meanwhile, longtime friends Shatner and Plummer played adversaries in 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which featured the latter as a Shakespeare-obsessed Klingon.

2. Shatner and Esperanto, spiders and Ernest Borgnine

There is some controversy over whether the 1966 horror film, Incubus, was in fact the first feature film to be shot entirely in Esperanto, a made-up language devised to somehow encourage world peace (or something like that) in the 19th century. In Shatner’s autobiography, Up Till Now, there’s the suggestion that Incubus was the first film with dialogue entirely in Esperanto. Not true. It seems makers of the 1964 French crime thriller Angoroj beat him to it a few years earlier. Still, Incubus was a decidedly strange project, with Shatner having this to say about the “metaphysical witchcraft picture”: “ ... no one forgot his lines; although that may have been due to the fact that no one knew their lines, no one understood their lines, and no one knew if anyone else was saying their lines correctly.” Shatner had other strange roles, particularly during those lean years after Star Trek ended its TV run. In 1977’s Kingdom of the Spiders, he appeared alongside hordes of angry tarantulas for his role as heroic, um, veterinarian Rack Hansen. Another horror film, The Devil’s Rain, had Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey as a technical adviser. Shatner starred alongside Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert, John Travolta and Ernest Borgnine, who “poked out my eyes and crucified me,” he reports in his autobiography.