When Patrick Stewart, who died on Wednesday, was first offered the role of Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” it was undeniably a risk. He was a classically trained actor, best known for his decades of work with the Royal Shakespeare and National Theater companies.
“You must not do that,” Stewart’s good friend Ian McKellen told him, as recounted in “Making It So,” Stewart’s 2023 memoir. “You must not. You have too much important theater work to do. You can’t throw that away to do television. You can’t. No!”
Stewart was first considered for the role because one of the show’s producers, Robert H. Justman, had been impressed by a lecture Stewart gave at U.C.L.A. and suggested him to the franchise’s creator, Gene Roddenberry.
Stewart knew nothing about “Star Trek,” and he wrote in his book that Roddenberry didn’t think he was right for the role.
But Stewart was in a self-described midlife crisis. He needed work and needed money. Roddenberry eventually changed his mind. And the franchise was changed for good. (In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, McKellen said Stewart had “long forgiven me.”)
By the time “Next Generation” premiered in 1987, “Star Trek” had built an immense fan base based on the original series and six films. If it was risky for Stewart to take on the series, the reverse was also true: Picard represented a divergence from the franchise’s signature hero, William Shatner’s James T. Kirk, and most other science fiction protagonists.
Kirk, like many fictional space cowboys, was a swashbuckling womanizer. He was impulsive and didn’t shy away from throwing or taking a punch.
Picard was different. He was measured and thoughtful, and he preferred diplomacy. He liked Earl Grey tea. In some ways, he fit Roddenberry’s vision of a utopian future more closely than Kirk did. The character was inspired by Horatio Hornblower, the fictional Royal Navy officer hero of the C.S. Forester novels.
When Picard finds himself on a planet with Dathon, a Tamarian he can’t understand, in the Season 5 episode “Darmok,” he builds a linguistic bridge between the two. (Every serious “Trek” fan knows the phrase “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”) Kirk might have punched out Dathon and called it a day.
Where Shatner was known for over-the-top acting, Stewart’s performance was generally understated. (That’s not to say it was objectively better: There’s a reason people still scream “KHHHAAAAN!!!”)
As Picard, Stewart set the tone for a series that dramatically expanded the aesthetic and emotional palette of the “Star Trek” universe, creating a new entry point for Trekkers of all ages and clearing the way for later series. “The Next Generation” eventually became as beloved as the original show, a rare franchise feat. (Consider how eager “Star Wars” fans were to welcome back the original stars in later films.)
So it is ironic, then, that when Stewart began to have more of a say in the direction of the character in later seasons, the end result in those episodes — and in four films and a spinoff series — was that Picard became less interesting, more conventional.
In the movies, the tea-sipping diplomat became more of an action hero, throwing punches, racing dune buggies and waving around a phaser while shouting lines like, “We’re getting too old for this!”
Stewart attributed the change to the character’s experiences in “Next Generation.” He wrote that beginning in “First Contact,” the 1996 film, Picard was “a fallible character rather than the noble, space-faring hero that ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ previously set him up to be — his lingering P.T.S.D. from his prior assimilation into the Borg has made him vengeful and short tempered.” (In the series, Picard is forced to join the alien race the Borg in “The Best of Both Worlds,” a two-parter now considered one of the greatest episodes in “Star Trek” history.) Ronald Moore, who wrote “First Contact,” said in a 2021 interview with SyFy Wire that Stewart asked to fight the Borg himself.
Watching this new Picard, it also seemed like an actor who first took on the Enterprise partly as a professional change of pace was trying to shake things up again. (Stewart also just loves to drive, he said in an interview for the “Star Trek: Nemesis” DVD, which explains the dune buggy scene.)
The character continued to evolve in “Picard,” a streaming spinoff that premiered in 2020. It’s probably not a coincidence that the show didn’t really jell until the third and final season, which reunited Stewart with his “Next Generation” castmates.
But despite the occasional misstep, Stewart’s decades-long stint as Jean-Luc Picard reset the table of what a science fiction hero could be. The end result was that whatever his initial reluctance to take the role, Stewart and Picard at some point became fused together.
“By the time we got into the seventh season, there was a total overlap between Jean-Luc Picard and Patrick Stewart,” he told StarTrek.com in 2010. “I no longer had to sit in my trailer getting into character. I knew this man intimately.”
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