Ask any actor to name a performance that made them want to be an actor, and you'll get people citing monumental ones like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice or Denzel Washington in "Malcolm X" — big, deep-tissue dives that require the thespians to use almost every part of their instrument. They want to leave the audience crying and cheering as they capture the full range of the human experience. They don't want to play, say, a monotone android whose sole function in the plot is to provide the occasional tidbit. This will leave them with nothing interesting to do, and likely little to add to their roll.

So when Gene Roddenberry started casting the star trek pilot in 1964, he probably didn't have actors knocking down his door to play Vulcan First Officer Spock, whose adherence to logic and lack of emotion seemed a dull task alongside the impulsive Captain James T. Kirk and the wily medical officer Leonard "Bones" McCoy. Obviously, no one at the time knew how the character would develop, nor could they have predicted the show's profound pop culture impact, so this isn't a case of nearly every Hollywood leading man turning down John McClane in Die Hard before. 20th Century Fox dropped an unprecedented $5 million on television star Bruce Willis. They really only had a pilot script to go on.

And this is why an up-and-coming actor turned down an iconic role to star in Mission: Impossible.

Martin Landau had already made his mark as James Mason's murderous henchman in 1959. Alfred Hitchcock's classic "North by Northwest" when Roddenberry and NBC offered him the role of Spock in the Star Trek pilot titled The Cage. Landau flatly refused them because, as he said Starlog in 1986, he "can't play wooden". Instead, he took on the role of master of disguise Rollin Hand in the first three seasons of Mission: Impossible.

Then again, to be fair, Landau couldn't have known that the series would turn into a cultural phenomenon that's still spawning new shows and movies 59 years after its network premiere. But even if he there was Knowing this, Landau says he would still decline the offer. As he told Starlog:

"I would make the same decision today. But I knew that if the series came out, Spock would be very effective. You should think of the turmoil of the 60s. A super-intelligent pointy-eared being who logically thought it was right - except I didn't want to act that I didn't want to be obsessed with the role of a character without the feeling that I would become news.

If you think this kind of disrespect for Spock would rub off on Leonard Nimoy, think again. Landau and Nimoy were very close friends. When the latter died in 2015, Landau wrote a moving memorial for his friend for Timecalling it a mensch. "Even though (our) first date was cordial, we both realized we could play the same roles and were obviously going to be competitors for those roles," he wrote, adding, "It really happened. As the years passed and our careers took different turns, we remained friends and were always delighted by our individual success (...)".

As for Landau's post-Mission: Impossible career, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's excellent Ed Wood, so not playing Spock worked out pretty well for him.