We’ve known since late last year that after a few rumors, Patrick Stewart will be once again playing former Enterprise Captain Jean Luc Picard in a new Star Trek show for CBS set in the TNG timeline. But how did CBS convince the veteran actor to come back and play the role again after so much time away?
According to Star Trek‘s top man Alex Kurtzman, it took a lot of persuading and assurances that this would not simply be a repetition of what had come before. Speaking with Variety the writer/director and producer of many films and shows talked about the recruitment of Patrick Stewart back to one of his most iconic roles.
“We heard he was very reticent, for a million understandable reasons, to do it, I think he just felt ‘I don’t know what else there is to do?’”
But after pitching the idea of Picard being deeply affected by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire (covered by LRM yesterday in the related section below), Stewart was convinced to pay attention.
“We proposed it to him, he sat there and listening very thoughtfully as he does, said, ‘Thank you, let me think about it,’ we thought we failed. But on Monday his agent called and said, ‘He’s interested and he’d like to know more and can you write down what you had.’”
A 4-page treatment became a 32-page full series outline and with that Stewart signed up to play Picard once more.
RELATED: Star Trek: Alex Kurtzman Reveals Event That Alters The Life of Picard In New Series
I won’t go into much detail about why I am excited for this show, because I covered that in plenty of detail in the previous news story linked above. Suffice to say I think from what I am reading, most fans are more excited by this project than anything else coming out of the Star Trek Franchise right now. In truth I’m not sure fans really want to go back and mess with the timeline of Kirk and Bones, they want to see new stories going beyond the realms of what’s already been covered. This quite succinctly sums up my own thoughts, but I have seen these echoed many times from other fans.
Are you happy to finally head back to the 24th-century version of Star Trek again? Mind meld with the other commenters in the usual place below.
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SOURCE: Variety
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