40 Years Ago, Patrick Stewart Almost Didn't Become Captain Picard
The world will miss Sir Patrick, but we're lucky we live in a world in which he became Picard at all.
The legendary actor Sir Patrick Stewart has passed away. The news was confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Stewart succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was 86 years old. For countless fans, Stewart embodied an ideal when it came to leadership and goodness in humankind. His portrayal of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and its four feature films earned him legendary status. In more recent years, Stewart returned to his most famous role in the spinoff series Picard, which ended on a triumphant, hopeful note. Both serious and kind, warm yet reserved, Stewart’s Picard was a kind of combination of the previous Trek heroes, Kirk and Spock, but rolled into one character. As Trek veteran Nichelle Nichols once observed: “It was telling that [Gene Roddenberry’s] last starship captain embodied both those characters, but was an older man, whose passions, though tempered by time, were not diminished.”
This assessment is correct: Picard is the ultimate Star Trek character because he was a combination of the best aspects of Kirk and Spock, and, throughout The Next Generation, Picard’s most important relationship was with another nearly perfect Trek character: Mr. Data. Stewart’s Shakespearean training has been mentioned several times in the past and contributed to his performance as Picard, but the character’s maturity, his status as our space dad, is what truly cemented Stewart in the zeitgeist forever. But what if he didn’t get the part? What if we lived in a universe in which Patrick Stewart wasn’t cast as Picard? It almost happened.
Patrick Stewart and the cast of The Next Generation in 1993.
As Stewart once recalled, in 1986, when TNG was beginning pre-production, Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was initially very opposed to casting Stewart, a bald man, in the role. “He may have been smart ... but he didn’t want me on the show,” was one memory Stewart had. Roddenberry’s conception of Picard was a virile Frenchman, and in his mind, Stewart didn’t quite fit the bill. Though Roddenberry and other studio executives obviously came around to Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, it was an uphill battle, with one interesting champion: a producer from Star Trek: The Original Series named Robert Justman.
“I was very, very enthused about Patrick playing the role,” Justman remembered. “And I kept after Gene, and Gene kept fighting me off until ... [we] were allied in the fight to get Patrick as the captain.” Essentially, after a lot of convincing, Roddenberry became team Stewart as well, and then the next question was whether or not a bald man could lead the sexy space explorers of the new Starship Enterprise. Famously, when a studio exec asked Roddenberry about the realism of a bald man in the 24th century, in which anything was possible, Roddenberry smartly replied: “In the 24th century, no one will care.”
Justman and Roddenberry were proven right, of course, as TV Guide named Stewart “the sexiest man on television” in 1992. While directing the pilot episode of The Next Generation, for the first scene in which Picard is introduced, and the camera zooms on his face, director Corey Allen gave Stewart one direction that the actor never forgot: “Patrick, I want you to f*ck the universe!”
The truth is, as Picard, Stewart did more than just that. He loved the universe, and we loved him right back. When asked by TV Guide in 1993 about his greatest memory of working on The Next Generation, Stewart praised his co-stars and said simply: “I’ve laughed more in the last six years than I have in my entire life.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation streams on Paramount+.
