Spock Would've Had An Operation If Leonard Nimoy Hated The Ears

Spock could've looked very different on Star Trek if the late Leonard Nimoy wasn't happy with the character's Vulcan ears.

Three years after Nimoy's death, The Hollywood Reporter found an old interview with Nimoy from 1976 in which he reveals that he hated the first set of prosthetic ears makeup artists created for the character a decade earlier. 

"In the early stages of developing the makeup, before we shot the first pilot, we were with the wrong makeup people," Nimoy said in the interview. "They were making the ears for me, experimentally at first, and they really looked grotesque. And we went through three of four of those sessions. As time got closer to the first day of shooting ... I became more and more concerned about the look." 

Nimoy said he was so unhappy with the ears that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry promised him that he'd write a storyline in which Spock has his pointed ears removed if things didn't improve.

"Finally, it was Fred Phillips, who was in charge of the makeup on the series, who knew what was wrong," Nimoy explained. "The problem was the studio had already made a commitment to these other people to make the ears and didn't want him to go elsewhere because it would cost more money. [Phillips] said we must and forced the issue, and got me a good pair of ears to solve the problem."

Nimoy claimed he wore 150 pairs of ears during the three-year run of the series, and the interview happened three years before he came back as Spock in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Considering that he appeared as the character in seven more Star Trek movies after that (including 2009's Star Trek and 2013's Star Trek Into Darkness), there's no telling how many ears he went through. 

Sadly, Nimoy died from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on Feb. 27, 2015. He was 83.