William Shatner admits he had “tremendous” reservations before agreeing to poke fun at his own name in a new Kellogg’s Raisin Bran campaign that debuted during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast.
In the spot, the 94-year-old actor pops up in a series of surreal locations, teleporting in to hand out bowls of Raisin Bran while characters repeatedly refer to him as “Will Shat” — a juvenile-sounding pun that plays on his surname while underscoring the cereal’s high-fiber, digestive benefits. It’s deliberately silly, but for Shatner, the joke hit closer to home than audiences might realize.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the Star Trek icon revealed that the humor stirred up old anxieties from his childhood, when classmates teased him relentlessly because of his name. “I haven’t lost those apprehensions,” he said, recalling locker room fights sparked by the same wordplay. “It was a sore spot as a child. It kind of lurks.”
Shatner also questioned whether a Super Bowl commercial built around bathroom humor could land in “decent taste.” He explained that Kellogg’s wanted to spotlight fiber in a funny way, which led to long conversations about how far the joke should go. “How do you make that amusing?” he said. “We worked on refining what was in decent taste, if not good taste, about what’s funny about going to the bathroom.”
While best known for his role as Captain James T. Kirk, Shatner has long been wary of leaning too heavily into Star Trek nostalgia. He noted that the ad’s opening, set in a futuristic control room, was carefully calibrated to nod to sci-fi without fully embracing it. “Visually, it looks good,” he said, adding that he chose wardrobe options that avoided direct references to the iconic uniform. “I tried to be tongue-in-cheek about it all.”
In the end, Shatner says he leaned into the self-awareness of the moment, hoping viewers would sense the joke was as much on him as it was about fiber. “I hope there’s a subtext of my knowing,” he said. “That I’m kidding myself.”
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