BANFF - There are a lot of people who would like to see William Shatner as Canada's next Governor General.
More than 46,000 people have joined a Facebook group to see that it happens.
On Wednesday afternoon, the 79-year-old actor was asked again if he'd be interested in the job.
Instead of answering, Shatner -- speaking to an audience at the Banff World Television Festival -- explained the story behind the question to interviewer Bill Prady, creator of CBS' The Big Bang Theory.
While Shatner is amused and humbled by the movement, he doesn't seem all that interested. "All the Governors General I've known have been old, distinguished and rich," he said. "I don't qualify for any of those."
Shatner would rather spend his time hanging with his four-legged friends. "I own too many horses," he said. "My manager says you're a fool to buy something that eats when you sleep. But I ride horses. I bought some land in foothills of the Sierras and I didn't know what to do with it."
He said a rancher who he hired to take care of the land suggested he buy horses and after purchasing one from a horse auction, Shatner was hooked.
"They're like chips. You can't just buy one ... And suddenly I was in (riding competitions) with 18-year-olds.
"I'm this age and I've still got the fire. I think it's the horses."
Shatner was in Banff this week to accept the festival's Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Montreal-born actor is one of television's most familiar faces, thanks to memorable roles on T.J. Hooker, Boston Legal and of course, Star Trek, in which he played the dashing Capt. James T. Kirk.
Shatner shared his memories of growing up and his early years in the entertainment business during the one-hour interview, and often had the audience howling with laughter.
Of his introduction to acting, Shatner said it was when he went to a summer camp on his aunt's Quebec farm, where one of the activities was to "watch the farmer slaughter a pig, drain it and save the blood for the blood sausage."
"It was there that I did something on a Sunday night when all the parents were there, I did something (on stage) to make them cry," recalled Shatner, who performed several Shakespearean roles at the esteemed Stratford Festival in Ontario in the 1950s.
"At the age of six. I had no knowledge of what I was doing. That was the school I came from."
Among the funniest moments was when Shatner explained how his children used to ask him to recreate scenes from his famous Twilight Zone episode, in which he was terrorized by a strange looking creature staring at him from outside an airplane window, when they flew together.
He then turned his chair around, yelled out, "stewardess!" and pulled the same melodramatic frightened face that has made the episode such a classic.
Prady -- whose nerdy Big Bang characters would have no doubt fainted with excitement -- managed to keep his own fanboy questions to a minimum, but he did bring up Shatner's "illustrious" singing career.
"George Clooney said of your version of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, that this was the song that he would want with him on a desert island because if you listen to this song, you will hollow out your own leg and make a canoe out of it," Prady told Shatner. "Would you like to respond?"
"I don't know the man," Shatner fired back, with superb comic timing.
"But I hate him."
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