When he was about 10 years old, Wil Wheaton, who would soon co-star in the movie “Stand by Me,” received a Dungeons & Dragons game as a Christmas gift from his great-aunt.
At first he was hugely disappointed, as his cousins had all received the newest and coolest in hand-held video games.
But his aunt knew what she was doing.
“She said, ‘This is a game for people who like to imagine things, and you have a great imagination. I think you’ll really like this,” he recalls.
She was right.
That game led Wheaton, who says he was “shy, bookish [and] weird” as a child, to embrace his geekdom — a move that has worked out spectacularly well.
Flash-forward 30 years, and he can boast 2.6 million Twitter followers, a recurring role as himself on television’s most popular sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory,” and “TableTop,” a popular board-game web series, not to mention the nerdiest of bona fides — playing Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
And now he has “The Wil Wheaton Project,” a weekly SyFy network show premiering Tuesday that’s a mash-up of “The Soup,” “Talking Dead” and “Attack of the Show.”
“I’m reviewing the things that we, in nerd culture, really love,” he says. “It’s a clip show of me setting up things that happened on ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘Walking Dead,’ ‘Orphan Black’ and all the superhero shows, then running clips and making jokes, and maybe talking about cool comic books and things we’ve seen online.”
The California native started acting at age 7, appearing in commercials and TV and movie guest spots before landing the role of Gordie Lachance in the 1986 hit “Stand by Me,” alongside River Phoenix. He then spent four seasons on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
But Wheaton grew disillusioned with Hollywood and followed his love of technology to Topeka, Kan., where he spent four years helping to develop a video-editing program called Video Toaster 4000, before the acting bug brought him back to California.Being a nerd is not about what you love, it’s about the way you love it.
- Wil Wheaton
The actor was also a relatively early adopter of Twitter, joining at the beginning of 2007. He was one of the few celebrity users at the time, allowing him the opportunity to build a solid following. Wheaton talked about his passions, including his love for “The Big Bang Theory,” and one of the show’s writers saw his tweets. He was eventually written into the show as himself, the youngish sci-fi icon that Sheldon Cooper, the show’s narcissistic, socially inept scientist played by Jim Parsons, immediately saw as a rival.
“Me and my friends, we are those characters,” Wheaton says.
His other passion is the web series “TableTop,” in which he films himself playing board and role-playing games with friends. He just raised more than $1.4 million through crowd-funding website Indiegogo to produce the show’s third season which, he says, made it the “most successfully crowd-funded web series in history.”
In celebrating the joys of the geek universe, Wheaton makes it clear that he sees this world as an open, all-inclusive place, not just for those who can recite “Star Wars” dialogue from memory.
“Being a nerd is not about what you love, it’s about the way you love it,” he says.
“A person can love ‘Doctor Who’ the same way another person might love baseball. There are different kinds of nerds for every different thing out there, and the more we can help people understand and embrace that fact, the more accepting and welcoming the entirety of the culture is going to be.”