J.J. Abrams recently spoke with MTV about casting for his impending Star Trek sequel, and here’s the latest on what J.J. Abrams had to say regarding possibly taking on “Star Trek’s” most iconic villain:

“I think one of the byproducts of doing this movie was we were able to dispel the obvious and understandable concerns—how can ‘Star Trek’ possibly exist without those original cast members?”

“Now that we are in a parallel existence with what fans of the original series love so much, we could introduce any number of characters, settings, references and situations that the original series introduced. Dealing with Khan would certainly be a challenge, but we had an equal challenge in finding our crew of the Enterprise.”

Abrams and writers (Kurtzman, Orci and Lindelof) have only just started to discuss story ideas for the sequel. But Abrams promised that in introducing past characters or storylines, the sequel will not become a simple rehashing of old movie or TV episodes.

“While I don’t want to approach the second film as a remake of episodes we’ve seen in the past… nothing is off limits in terms of what we’re discussing,” he said. “When Bob Orci and the others who know ‘Trek’ so well, the fun of working with them is they know this universe so deeply they’re the ones who are always considering what it means to deal with the stuff in the past, so it’ll be exciting.”