Star Trek: Picard’s Patrick Stewart Discusses Comparisons to Logan

Patrick Stewart is returning to his Star Trek: The Next Generation character Jean-Luc Picard in the new series Star Trek: Picard on CBS All Access. Back in 2017, he returned as Professor X for one more installment of the X-Men movies, Logan. In previous interviews, he’s discussed how Logan helped convince him to return as Picard, something he’d been resistant to in the past. But in ComicBook.com’s discussion with Stewart, he says he doesn’t want Logan to be a point of comparison for Star Trek: Picard. Rather, it was a shorthand for him to let the show’s creative team know what he expected from Picard‘s story.

“I am reluctant to make comparisons because when I cited Logan it was still a very, very fresh experience for me,” Stewart says, “and I only used it to enforce to the people I was talking to – Alex [Kurtzman] and Michael [Chabon] and Akiva [Goldsman] – that it was very important that our starting off point was not the day that I walked off the Enterprise say, but other things, more complicated things, things that he is perhaps badly responsible for, not doing his job properly, not being effective, and also letting pride control his actions and self-regard control his actions, which is very un-Picard-like but is truthful in this situation.”

This echoes the story Stewart told during a 2019 convention appearance. “I asked to meet them all again and at the second meeting, I had specific terms and conditions that I said would allow me to think about reviving this world,” Stewart said. “Much of it was about what the world would be that you were going back to. I referenced X-Men and particularly the final movie that Hugh Jackman and myself did, Logan, as [to] what I had in mind. Logan was nothing like any of the other X-Men movies that had come before. It was very, very different. The world had changed. And so, I challenged Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman to come up with ideas for a completely different world than the one that we had known 17 or 18 years earlier.”

In a previous interview, Stewart discussed how he was more satisfied with how his time as Professor X ended in Logan than he was with the sendoff Picard got in 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. “Hugh [Jackman] and I were so thrilled when the last thing we did for X-Men was Logan,” he said. “It was the best X-Men experience we both had, because we were the same characters but their world had been blown apart.” He adds, “Next Generation didn’t end like that. In fact, our last movie, Nemesis, was pretty weak.”

Star Trek: Picard premieres January 23rd on CBS All Access.