By GustavoLeao / 23:05, 21 April 2007 / General Star Trek

Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered the week of September 28, 1987 with the two-hour pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint". We meet for the first time Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Galaxy Class U.S.S. Enterprise NCC 1701-D. In this pilot episode, written by Gene Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana, Captain Picard and his crew are confronted by a supreme being named Q, who challenged them to solve the mystery of Farpoint station.

Here is how the Picard character is described in the show's casting call bible :

Captain Julian Picard: A Caucasian man in his 50's who is very youthful and in prime physical condition. Born in Paris, his Gallic accent appears only when deep emotions are triggered. He is definitely a `romantic' and believes strongly in concepts like honor and duty. Captain Picard commands the Enterprise. He should have a mid-Atlantic accent, and a wonderfully rich speaking voice...

Cast in the role (now renamed Jean-Luc) was Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart, who impressed TNG producer Robert Justman in a theater performance in LA. Justman was able to convince Gene Roddenberry that Stewart was the man for the role.

"Gene and I were searching for the proper captain and we hadn't found him." Justman recalled to BBC Online "We knew it was a man and we knew he was French and he was very hairy. Hopefully he was a handsome leading man, French, in fact."

"We saw some rather good actors. But time was passing and we were getting close to when we had to start filming. We couldn't find that magical person. My wife and I were taking a course at UCLA on humour. In the arts. Tonight's lecture was to be a reading by two people - one was Patrick Stewart.

He came out with the lady and they were - proceeded to do some Shakespeare. And he read his first line and I went crazy. I turned to my wife I said I think I've found our new captain."
 

"We met at Gene Roddenberry's house, Patrick pulled up in his rental car and we spent about 45 minutes together, talking. We watched Patrick drive away in his rental car to go to the airport and Gene closed the door, turned around, faced me and said, and I quote, 'I won't have him.'"

"He wouldn't have him and he wouldn't tell me why. But I know why. I knew why. I knew that he had conceived of a Frenchman. And, you know, who was masculine, virile, and had a lot of hair. And Patrick didn't fit that at all. Patrick was not so handsome, he was distinctive, and he was quite bald. Quite bald."

"I was hot to trot. I was very, very enthused about Patrick playing the role. And I kept after Gene and Gene kept fighting me off until one day we had a new producer come on the scene, and that was Rick [Berman]. Rick saw Patrick's film and fell in love with him. As did our casting director. So the three of us were allied in the fight to get Patrick as the captain. And Gene was allied in his own fight not to have him at all. So finally I realised that the more I pushed, the more he dug his heels in."

"I made an announcement, one day, in a meeting when the subject was brought up and I said I don't want to hear the name Patrick Stewart ever again. It's over with Patrick Stewart, forget him. I did that on purpose to make Gene think that I'd given up.

"And every time anyone mentioned Patrick Stewart's name to me, I would explode and say 'I don't want to hear that. Don't tell me Patrick Stewart any more'. Finally our last possible candidate came to audition for us. And the guy, whoever he was, read for us and talked with us and he left the room, the door closed and we were all silent. There was not a sound to be heard. And finally Gene Roddenberry heaved a big sigh. He said 'All right, I'll go with Patrick'"

Now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of this fan-favorite series, TrekWeb brings you this BBC Online interview with Stewart, in which he talks about the genesis of the role of Jean-Luc Picard.

How did you take on the role?

We had a very good pilot script which laid the foundations for all of the characters, particularly for Picard. Very clearly and very strongly. There were defining characteristics of the man in that pilot episode which remained in place and still do in fact.

I did have a meeting with Gene Roddenberry. He took me out to dinner to discuss Jean Luc Picard and we ended up not talking about Star Trek at all. The only thing he did say at the end of the dinner was that he wanted to give me some books to read because he thought they would be helpful perhaps, and it turned out that these were the - Hornblower books and he said that he had had Horatio Hornblower very much in mind when he was creating the character of Picard. But of course I was already very much familiar with these books because I'd read them as a teenager.

Somebody asked me what it felt like to be stepping into Captain Kirk's shoes, but as I pointed out he was filling those shoes very satisfactorily still, because they made two feature films during the time that we were shooting the series and so the life of the original Star Trek was continuing.

What was it about the role that attracted you?

Crudely what attracted me was the fact that he was the captain. I had thought originally that I was being cast as some token Englishman on the crew. Nobody said anything to me about captain until I think I went back for my last audition interview at Paramount and that peeked my interest much more when I realised that it was the head guy on the ship.

It's perfectly clear that as the captain I was going to be having the dominant role in most of the episodes and that was appealing too. I wasn't interested in coming to Hollywood to sit around, and in fact I had a rude awakening in that respect ‘cos I was unaware of how hard the work was going to be. How intense and - and all consuming, whereas if I'd been playing one of the other characters it would have been very much less so.

Roddenberry had created quite a complex and at times mysterious character. Guarded, cautious, careful in showing his feelings in expressing his ideas about many things and I found that very interesting.

The reason that I'm struggling a little bit with this question is there actually weren't many good reasons for accepting it, and again I'm looking back over a big chunk of history now. I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I'd
thought about from time to time but it was completely unrealistic.

It was just something that I felt I couldn't pass up on. It was too unexpected, unusual and interesting, as well as remunerative too to ignore.

Nobody believed that the series would ever become the success that it did. In fact one of the reasons that I signed on was that I was assured that the six year contract that I was signing was meaningless, that this series would do one, perhaps two years at the most because nobody expected it to be successful.

Did the decision had a very big impact on you personally?

The hours I was most unprepared for. The 12 to 16 hour days and the alarming speed with which episode followed episode and the amount of learning that I had to do, so we worked from Monday till Friday and often most weeks into the early hours of Saturday morning and then certainly in the first couple of years I spent my weekends, Saturdays and Sundays, preparing for the next week, because otherwise you would never catch up.

Also the fact that I was encouraged and I was also interested in contributing to the scripts as much as possible, engaged me much more than I'd expected. But I was seven thousand miles away from home and I was often lonely and missed friends and family and aspects of my work too. I do remember once coming home quite late at night from the studio, driving along Beverly Boulevard and having to pull over because my eyes were so filled with tears because a piece of Elgar was playing on the radio.

It was a long time before any of us realised that we were very slowly becoming well known as actors. That was a very, very slow process, largely brought about by the fact that we were too busy working to lift up our heads and pay attention to what was happening. We knew that the series was doing well, but it really wasn't until the first season ended that I went to my first Star Trek convention.

It was in Denver and [I] had expected that I would be standing in front of a few hundred people and found that there were two and a half thousand people and that they already knew more about me than I could ever possibly have believed.

Did you know it would go on for so long?

We were well into our second season before all of us got that look in our eyes that maybe the predictions had been wrong and that it wasn't going to end after two years or three.Even then we used to think only about maybe four years or five. The fact that it was to go on for seven - if I had known that I would never have been part of it in the first place.

You wouldn't have been able to commit?

No, no. NO. And looking back now it still frightens me a little bit to think that so much of my life was totally devoted to Star Trek and almost nothing else.

Were you surprised in the way in which Star Trek fans accepted you as a new captain?

Well I'm not sure they did to begin with. I think there was a lot of resistance to the idea of a new Star Trek series from those who had been fans of the original series.

Kirk and Spock, McCoy and the rest had become such legendary figures that there was a sense that they were somehow going to be debased, devalued by having a new series.

What's so good about playing a character for such a long time?

To be connected with a role for over a period of years, continuously connected, meant that you had a choice really, either the character stood still and you kind of stagnated and repeated the same things, or as all of us determined we would try to let these characters develop and grow.

I made a promise to myself, I don't know, round about year two or three, that I would try to introduce something unexpected in every single episode of the series. It was largely to amuse myself as much as anything in thinking of these things,but I didn't ever want the audience to feel that they knew everything.

I certainly wanted to maintain some sense of mystery about Picard and that's why we never allowed certain situations to fully evolve, like the relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher. That was never allowed to evolve in the way that many of the fans wanted it to, simply because it was far more interesting for it not to. For the tension to remain there about all of that.

It's a novel experience for an actor, very few of us get the opportunity to develop someone over many many years and - and it's still happening now. This morning I was at a meeting discussing the script for the next Star Trek movie, Star Trek 10, and because we have a new writer, a non Star Trek writer this time, John Logan, a wonderful writer, I find myself talking a lot about Picard and one of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard what I find is I'm talking about myself.

There was a sort of double action that occurred. In one sense Picard was expanding like this and at the same time he was also growing closer and closer to me as well and in some respect I suppose even had some influence on me. I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well.

What's really challenging about playing a science-fiction role?

Encouraging people to believe in it was the most important thing of all. It's one of the reasons why I was always uncomfortable whenever film crews came on the set to shoot things. I didn't want our make believe to be exposed.

I got into trouble once with the studio for walking off a set when I think it was Good Morning America was going to shoot their segment from our sets and I had been very reluctant to participate in this and in fact I thought it was a bad idea.

I didn't want to have newsreaders and people sitting around on our sets, but they were all together interviewing the cast and it was thought to be good promotion for the show and I got a promise from them that they would be serious about it.

Then when I arrived I found that they'd worked out stunts with guys in funny heads - and I objected to it because I thought that it was undignified.

The full interview can be found here.

	More Top Stories	Comments
Nov 22	Exclusive Digital Content Now Available With New Star Trek Movie on iTunes	0
Nov 22	Star Trek Online MMORPG Producer Talks Space Combat and Away Missions	0
Nov 21	Faran Tahir on His 10 Minutes as Captain Robau in J.J. Abrams Star Trek Movie	2
Nov 21	J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman on Shatner and Nimoy	7
Nov 21	Roberto Orci on the Status of the Star Trek XII Script and the Possibility of Producing a New Star Trek TV Series	16
	Story Archives...Browse:   AllBits - Miscellany Deep Space NineEnterpriseGamingGeneral Genre/SciFiGeneral Star Trek PeopleStar Trek: NemesisTodays TribbletsTrek BooksVoyagerFeatures