'Star Trek' actor Anton Yelchin dies in freak car accident

Anton Yelchin: actor of cherubic charm who inspired huge affection

The rising star – best known for playing Chekov in the new films – was found dead in his driveway early on Sunday morning

Anton Yelchin, Star Trek actor, dies in car accident at age 27

Fans of Jeremy Saulnier’s ultraviolent horror Green Room will have enjoyed an irony in the casting – maybe even suspected a deliberate extra-textual joke. A struggling punk band find themselves stranded in the middle of Oregon, their van conked out in a field, and desperate for some cash agree to play at a roadhouse exclusively patronised by neo-Nazi skinheads. They want to do the gig, get paid and get out, but things get complicated when they chance across a dead body backstage. The venue is run by a very sinister old white bald guy called Darcy, played by Patrick Stewart — associated by many with his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The band’s moody-yet sympathetic bass guitarist Pat is played by Anton Yelchin – widely associated with his breakout role as Chekov, in the rebooted first-gen movie series of Star Trek.

Yelchin, far left, as Chekov in the 2008 Star Trek reboot Photograph: Photo Credit: Industrial Light a/Publicity image from film company

It hardly seems credible, but Yelchin, tipped as one of the most exciting and charismatic of the new twentysomething generation, has now been killed in a freak car accident – an event as sad and shocking as Paul Walker’s death in 2013 or Heath Ledger’s in 2008.

'Star Trek' Star Anton Yelchin: Dead After Freak Accident

Yelchin’s charm and openness as a performer had earned him a wide following: he had a gentle, at certain angles almost babyish face: a cherubic face in fact, with its flecks of bum-fluff, which nonetheless was growing leaner and more chiselled as he was growing into his late 20s. And how grim that thought is now. It was a face suitable for any kind of all-American boy next door role: but he was a very shrewd choice to play Star Trek’s 17-year-old Russian navigator Chekov. Unlike Walter Koenig, who played the role originally, Yelchin was actually Russian: born in St Petersburg (or at that time, Leningrad) to two figure-skating Olympians who moved to the United States as political refugees shortly after his birth in 1989.

Anton Yelchin Dead: 'Star Trek' Actor Dies in Car Accident

Star Trek was Yelchin’s breakout moment, and he relished giving interviews and press conferences in Russian for the movies’ junket tours in Russia. But in the movies he had to speak English in the understood hammy Ryussian accyent which of course was far from his actual English voice as a California resident. His Chekov was a more comic role, his relative youth and vulnerability being ratcheted up, saucer-eyed with earnest self-importance as he relayed vital information to Kirk or Spock on the bridge.

The actor, who has died at the age of 27, made an effortless move from small indie films to big budget blockbusters. We look back over his career in clips

In some ways, Yelchin’s finest hour as an actor, the movie that most heartbreakingly shows what he could have been capable of doing, was Drake Doremus’s long-distance love story Like Crazy from 2011. Yelchin is Sam, a young American guy who falls for a Brit college student Anna, played by Felicity Jones, while she fatefully outstays her visa to pursue their passionate affair. They are forced apart by this act of lawbreaking, and while separated, Sam begins another relationship with a co-worker, played by Jennifer Lawrence. It was a performance which emphasised Yelchin’s sheer youth: a performance concerned to show youth as it is actually experienced in real life, rather than in the movies or TV – a youth of quarterlife career angst, full of bewilderment at the scary permanence of life-choices.

Actor Anton Yelchin of 'Star Trek' films dies in freak accident

Before this, Yelchin commanded huge affection for one of his early roles, at the age of 18: Charlie Bartlett in the film of the same name, playing a rich kid who offers his services as psychiatrist to the student body. Later, in 2011, the same year as Love Crazy he had a cute role in the remake of Fright Night, playing the kid who realises that the guy who has moved in next door (Colin Farrell) is a vampire.

Latterly, Yelchin had been broadening his range, including a well-regarded if not mould-breaking performance as Cloten in Michael Almereyda’s film version of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline at the Venice film festival in 2014. For the same director, Yelchin acted in Experimenter in 2015, about the notorious Stanford psychological experiments.

Yelchin was maturing – and could have had a career like Ryan Gosling’s or Jon Hamm’s or indeed Colin Farrell’s, his co-star from Fright Night. We shall never know. A hugely popular and well-liked actor of enormous talent and potential has been snuffed out. What a waste.