William Shatner Reveals His Reaction to His Face Becoming Michael Myers’ Halloween Mask

How would it feel to know that your face was adapted for Michael Myers’ iconic mask? William Shatner recently got to experience that feeling firsthand.

In an interview with YouTube channel Jake’s Tales, Shatner described his reaction to seeing the mask for the first time saying, “I thought, is that a joke? Are they kidding?”

While Myers’ facemask is about as iconic as they come in the world of horror disguises, its origin story was only recently detailed in an episode of Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us. During the show, Hollywood designer Tommy Lee Wallace explained that he’d found the mask during a trip to a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard. In order to give it its signature appearance, Wallace then made a number of modifications to the mask including widening the eyeholes, painting it white, and darkening its hair.

“I don’t think I saw the movie but I saw the mask probably in a picture, and I recognized it as the death mask they had made for me,” Shatner explains when recalling the time he first saw the mask. “They made a mask of my face on Star Trek with clay so that I wouldn’t have to be available for the prosthetics that they would put on my face to look old or evil or whatever it was they were making me look like. So that mask existed on Start Trek [and] somewhere along the line, someone got that mask and made a mask of it for [the holiday] Halloween.”

Michael Myers recently featured in director and producer David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills. The film acts as the middle child in Green’s trilogy of Halloween films and finally came out in theatres (as well as to the streaming service Peacock) on October 15 following an earlier delay that had pushed it back an entire year. IGN review of Halloween Kills awarded it a 7/10. In our write-up, we said that it “delivers gory fun, fantastic performances” despite suffering from being the “second chapter in a trilogy.”

For more on Halloween Kills make sure to check out this article where Gordon Green himself explains the film’s ending – warning spoilers ahead – or this piece detailing seven things you probably didn’t know about Halloween.

Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.