With the Star Trek franchise being as iconic and popular as it is, there are a lot of notable installments. From the groundbreaking original television series to the fan favorite The Next Generation series, to even specific movies that fans continue to talk about for various reasons. Among those films, however, is one that is infamous not for its story or success, but for other things, namely its poor box office performance. That film is Star Trek: Nemesis. The 2002 film is the tenth in the franchise and notably features one of Tom Hardy’s earliest performances and, according to Nemesis stars, the actor was treated badly on set.
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During an appearance on Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner’s Dropping Names… And Other Things podcast (via Screen Rant), Ron Perlman revealed that Hardy was “sweet” while Spiner revealed the actor hadn’t been treated very well by director Stuart Baird.
“He was so sweet, and so… talk about deferential,” Perlman said. “And [he] so appreciated our time together. We bonded big time.”
“He was not treated very well by the director,” Spiner said.”
“I mean, he wasn’t a. director,” Perlman added. “He was a f-cking editor that the studio owed a favor to. He said, ‘You want to pay me back? Let me direct a movie.’ So, they gave him [Star Trek: Nemesis.]”
Poor Treatment on Set May Explain How Others Perceived Hardy
Perlman and Spiner’s comments about Hardy are particularly interesting when juxtaposed with Patrick Stewart’s recollections of Hardy from the film. In Star Trek: Nemesis, Hardy played Shinzon, a Romulan-created clone of Picard (Stewart) who had become the leader of the Remans who plans to invade the Federation and then destroy life on Earth. In his Making it So memoir, Stewart had previously described Hardy as an “odd solitary young man” and wrote that he simply wouldn’t socialize with anyone. However, if Spiner’s comment that Hardy wasn’t treated very well by the film’s director, while it’s not exactly clear what Spiner meant about that, it might have been enough to prompt Hardy to keep to himself.
Nemesis was one of Hardy’s earliest feature film roles and comes very early in his overall career on the whole. It’s entirely possible that, as a newer actor, mistreatment from the director significantly shaped his on-set behavior. It’s also interesting to hear Perlman have positive things to say about Hardy, considering that the actor has had a reputation as being difficult and, most recently, there had been speculation that he was fired from the crime series MobLand over behavior—though recent reports have indicated that he was not fired.
What is also noteworthy is that this is by no means the first time that Star Trek actors have expressed issues with Baird. Baird was a newcomer to Star Trek overall and was reportedly completely disinterested in learning things about the franchise, which according to Frakes included being “not interested” in hearing from the Star Trek cast about various things regarding their characters. With it sounding like Baird was the primary issue on the set of Star Trek: Nemesis, it’s in retrospect not a surprise that the film dramatically underperformed at the box office.
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