Adam Nimoy Recalls Being 'Beamed Up' on His Dad's "Star Trek" Set

Adam Nimoy, the son of Leonard Nimoy, marked "Bring Your Child to Work Day" this week with a post that many Star Trek fans will find genuinely delightful. Sharing an old photo of himself with his father on the Star Trek set to X on Sunday, April 26, Adam, 69, wrote: "Bring Your Kid to Work Day. Other kids got an office tour. I got beamed up. #StarTrek #LeonardNimoy #Spock #LLAP #FBF"

The caption captures something true about what it meant to be the child of a man who wore pointed ears to work every day. Most kids who tagged along on a parent's workday ended up in a conference room or storeroom. Adam Nimoy got the transporter room.

The Mini-Spock Prank

The set visits were not without their own extraordinary memories. According to actress Nichelle Nichols' memoir, Beyond Uhura, the original Star Trek cast once orchestrated one of the more elaborate pranks in television history — and Adam was at the center of it.

When Adam was around eight years old, the cast secretly fitted him in a child-size Starfleet uniform and gave him full Vulcan makeup, including the ears. They then sent him into a scene to act opposite his father, who had no idea his son was arriving on set that day. The goal was simple: get Leonard Nimoy to break character.

It didn't work. Leonard answered without missing a beat and without a single crack in his composure. The moment became legendary when Adam then "stepped out of character" — a seven-year-old dropping the act — and said, "But Daddy, I love you." Leonard's response: "Thank you, Adam." Delivered evenly. As Nichols recalled, the joke ended up being on everyone else: they had planned to watch Leonard crack up, and he never did.

The Complicated Side of Growing Up Spock's Son

Adam Nimoy explored the more complicated dimensions of that childhood in his 2016 documentary For the Love of Spock, which he began making with his father in September 2014 — just a few months before Leonard died on February 27, 2015, at age 83.

In a 2016 interview with People, Adam described the emotional weight of having a father so thoroughly inhabited by the most famous reserved character in television history. Leonard's stoic approach to the role bled into his life at home. "Dad was a very reserved guy who didn't express a lot emotionally, although he was feeling a lot emotionally," Adam said, "and that molded into the character."

For a young boy looking for connection and direction, the emotional distance was real. Leonard had made a conscious decision to stay in the role even outside the studio, allowing Spock to percolate in him — which meant that when he came home, he was still, in some essential way, playing Spock. "This was a guy who would come home and be very difficult to relate to," Adam recalled.

The story, though, does not end there. Through individual recovery work, Adam and Leonard rebuilt their relationship over the final seven years of Leonard's life and became genuinely close. When Leonard died, Adam continued the documentary as a way of working through the grief. "It was an incredibly wonderful process to go through in order for me to grieve the loss of my dad and enter the post-Leonard era of my life," he said.

Who Leonard Nimoy Was

For the generation that grew up with him, Leonard Nimoy was simply Spock — the half-Vulcan, half-human science officer of the USS Enterprise, defined by logic, by the suppression of emotion, and by a quiet dignity that made him one of the most beloved characters in American television history. The original Star Trek ran from 1966 to 1969, but Nimoy reprised the role across multiple films and appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards for the role.

Outside of Star Trek, he hosted the paranormal documentary series In Search Of..., directed Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and wrote two memoirs — the first, published in 1975, was titled I Am Not Spock, and the second, published two decades later, was I Am Spock. The shift in titles tells its own story about how his relationship to the character changed over a lifetime. He died on February 27, 2015, at age 83.

Holding On to the Memory

What Adam Nimoy shared this week was simple: a photo, a caption, a flash of something real from a childhood that happened to take place on the bridge of a starship. Adam Nimoy has found ways to keep his father's memory alive without erasing the complexity of what their relationship actually was.

The era Star Trek began in — the 1960s and its immediate aftermath — produced some of the most enduring art in American popular culture, and its figures are now, one by one, moving into memory. Adam's X post is a small act of holding on.

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