Some actors dream of playing Hamlet. James McAvoy dreams of playing Patrick Stewart, and he has now admitted he came within a whisker of doing it for a second franchise.
Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, McAvoy said he took a young-Picard series to the Star Trek team. It had a title, Mutiny on the Stargazer, and it was pitched as “a one-off standalone season” set during Jean-Luc Picard’s years in command of the USS Stargazer, long before he took over the Enterprise. According to McAvoy, the series would have dug into “the secret he’s been holding onto his entire career”. The Trek people were, he says, “into it”, until “logistical issues” got in the way. “We nearly did it,” he said, before delivering the line that sums up his entire CV: “All I really want to do in my career is play young versions of Patrick.”
He isn’t joking, or at least he isn’t only joking. McAvoy has already spent four films as the young Charles Xavier in the X-Men series, from First Class (2011) to Dark Phoenix (2019), and in Days of Future Past he shared the screen with the older model. He has also been floating the idea of a young Picard publicly since at least 2019, when he told TrekMovie about it. The new bit is that this was apparently no idle chat-show wish. A pitch existed, it had a name, and it reached actual conversations. No date has been given for the pitch, and Paramount hasn’t commented.
He would not even have been the first to try. Tom Hardy got there in 2002 as Shinzon, the Romulan-grown clone of Picard in Star Trek: Nemesis, which proved that playing a young Patrick Stewart is no guarantee of anything except a lot of time in the make-up chair.
The Stargazer years are a smart patch of continuity to mine, because The Next Generation left them half-told. Picard commanded the ship for more than two decades. That ended with the Battle of Maxia against the Ferengi, the loss of the ship and the court martial that Starfleet holds whenever a captain comes home without one. Jack Crusher, husband of Beverly and father of Wesley, also died under Picard’s command, a guilt the show returned to more than once. Book readers will recall that Michael Jan Friedman already set a run of Stargazer novels in this period for Pocket Books in the early 2000s, so there is form for treating it as its own little series.
What the “secret” might be, McAvoy didn’t say. Fans have wasted no time guessing: something buried in the Maxia battle, or something to do with Jack Crusher. Those are guesses, though, and they will stay guesses unless Paramount+ finds itself short of a prequel, which on current form seems unlikely. Then there is the title. Picard is the most Horatio Hornblower of Starfleet captains, and you could hardly give him a more seafaring name for a show than one borrowed from the Bounty. A mutiny on Picard’s own bridge, against the man who later out-argued Q, would at least be something Trek has never shown.
McAvoy says he still goes to bed thinking about it. Given that he has already done young Patrick once and Tom Hardy did him with Romulan prosthetics, we suspect the man himself would simply say: make it so.
Source: Gizmodo, reporting Happy Sad Confused.
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