Last April, Leonard Nimoy announced his intentions to vanish into the ether, drawing a curtain on his acting career so that he may live out his august years indulging in more personal pursuits, like photographing naked people. As it turns out, that was true. And by true, I mean false. It was all lies. But they were entertaining lies, and in the end, isn’t that the real truth? The answer is: no. Anyway, Nimoy will return to movies, sort of, as the voice of Sentinel Prime, the predecessor to Optimus Prime whose wrecked body was glimpsed in the teaser trailer for Michael Bay’s upcoming NASA exposé Transformers: Dark Of The Moon. In addition to causing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to spend their whole post-1969 lives slowly going mad, Sentinel Prime will reportedly play a key role in the forthcoming final Transformers battle in Chicago, but only after first living out every 4-year-old’s dream of being a fire engine.
Nimoy is certainly no stranger to the Transformers franchise, having voiced Galvatron in the 1986 Transformers movie, and, on an odd personal note, marrying Michael Bay’s cousin, Susan, making this a clear case of nepotism. And having him bring a little veteran actor gravitas to another Transformers film also gives Leonard Nimoy yet another thing he has in common with Orson Welles—the first being, of course, the oft-noted similarities between 1969’s The Touch Of Leonard Nimoy and Welles’ long-lost 1970 album, A Little Night Orson.