Ask any actor to name a performance that made them want to become an actor, and you’ll get people citing monumental figures like Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice” or Denzel Washington in “Malcolm They want to let the audience cry and applaud while capturing the full range of the human experience. They don’t want to play, for example, a monotonous android whose only function in the plot is to provide occasional information. This would leave them with nothing interesting to do and, most likely, little to add to their reel.

So when Gene Roddenberry started casting the pilot of “Star Trek” in 1964 he probably didn’t have actors knocking on his door to play Vulcan first officer Spock, whose adherence to logic and lack of emotion seemed a dull assignment next to the impulsive Captain James T. Kirk and the grumpy doctor Leonard. “Bones” McCoy. Obviously, no one knew at the time how the character would be developed, nor could they have predicted the deep pop cultural impact of the series. So this isn’t a case where almost every leading man in Hollywood has turned down John McClane in “Die Hard” before. 20th Century Fox has invested an unprecedented $5 million in TV star Bruce Willis. They really only had the pilot script to go on.

And that’s why a promising actor turned down the iconic role to star in “Mission: Impossible.”

Martin Landau had already established himself as James Mason’s murderous henchman in the 1959 film. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “North by Northwest” when Roddenberry and NBC offered him the role of Spock in the “Star Trek” pilot called “The Cage.” Landau refused them categorically because, as he said Star Diary in 1986, he “doesn’t know how to play wood”. Instead, he starred as master of disguise Rollin Hand in the first three seasons of “Mission: Impossible.”

Again, to be fair, Landau couldn’t have known that the series would turn into a cultural phenomenon that continues to spawn new shows and movies 59 years after its network premiere. But even if he had Knowing this, Landau said he still would have declined the offer. As he told Starlog:

“I would make the same decision today. But I knew that if the series succeeded, Spock would be very effective. You have to think of the turmoil of the 60s. A superintelligent creature with pointy ears who thought logically was absolutely right – except I didn’t want to play the role. I didn’t want to be saddled with the role of a character without feeling. Actually, news anchors are more emotional than Spock.

If you think such disrespect towards Spock would have upset Leonard Nimoy, think again. Landau and Nimoy were very close friends. When the latter died in 2015, Landau wrote a touching memory of his friend for the timecalling him a mensch. “Even if [our] The first meeting was cordial, we both realized that we could play the same roles and that we would clearly be competitors for these roles,” he wrote, adding: “It happened. Over the years and as our careers took different turns, we remained friends and always delighted with our individual success. Our mutual respect grew. […]”

As for Landau’s career after “Mission Impossible,” he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s superb “Ed Wood,” so not playing Spock worked out pretty well for him.