James McAvoy Makes His Pitch to Play Young Picard in New ‘Star Trek’ Series

James McAvoy is making his pitch to play young Jean-Luc Picard in the upcoming Star Trek series on CBS All Access.

McAvoy plays Professor X in the X-Men movies, playing a younger version of the role originated by Patrick Stewart. He’d like to continue playing young Patrick Stewart by joining the Star Trek franchise as the younger version of Stewart’s iconic captain.

In an interview with MTV News, seen above, McAvoy pleaded his case.

“I will take you where no Star Trek fan has gone before,” McAvory said. “I will reveal things about Jean-Luc Picard that nobody even wanted to see. I will rip this captain to shreds.”

McAvory offered his take on a few of Picard’s iconic lines, including “make it so,” “engage,” and “tea, earl grey, hot.” He then recounted a story that Stewart had told him about working on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“He told me a really good story once about how he was also the captain of the actors on set (some of the other cast members of Next Gen will be like, ‘What? I was the boss’), but when they had to do torpedo hits or photon torpedo hits on the Enterprise or whatever, they all had to, they’d have to, ‘Whoa!’ do the classic thing, and then he would be in charge of setting the tone so that everybody was on the same level,” McAvoy said. “And they’d be like, ‘What’d you think, Patrick?’ and he’d be like ‘Oh, that’s a number three.’ And the whole cast knew what a number one was.”

McAvoy demonstrated some of the different levels of “the ship is taking damage” style acting he got from Stewart. He then went on to say that he doubts he’ll get a call to work on the new Picard series, but he’s still looking forward to watching it.

“No, I’m not expecting to get a call to play the young Jean-Luc, unfortunately,” McAvory said. “But I will be tuning in and I can’t wait to see what he does because he’s a brilliant actor and he’s amazing in that role and it’s just nice that Star Trek are looking forward than just spaceship and a crew, do you know what I mean? They’re doing something different, and that’s awesome.”

Do you think McAvoy would make a good young Picard? Let us know in the comment!

The new Picard-focused Star Trek series will debut on CBS All Access in late 2019.