Star Trek: Patrick Stewart Reveals His Goals for Returning as Picard

Star Trek: Picard star Patrick Stewart had some specific goals in mind for his return to his beloved Star Trek: The Next Generation character. During a discussion with Henry Cavill set up via Variety, Stewart remarks on how the barrier between himself and his role broke down over the years he played Picard. He wanted to put those walls back up to find new challenges in Picard. “During the seven years that we filmed Next Generation and the four feature films that followed it, without intending to, Picard came closer and closer and closer to me, to Patrick,” Stewart says. “After a while, there was no place that I could identify where Jean-Luc left off, and Patrick Stewart began.

“What I did want — to the writers, I cited the movie Logan that I did with Hugh Jackman, the last of the X-Men movies. That movie found the two of us in conditions that were totally unlike anything that we experienced before, and it was thrilling for both of us because we were continually being challenged. I said to my fellow producers, ‘I would like the same thing.’ The contrast between the Picard that I had been in Next Generation, and how the years that have passed had changed him. He was now angry, moody, guilty, sad, lonely, which he had never been before.”

Stewart has spoken about Logan‘s influence on Picard before, including to ComicBook.com ahead of the show’s Hollywood premiere. “I am reluctant to make comparisons because when I cited Logan it was still a very, very fresh experience for me,” Stewart said, “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.”

In a separate interview, Stewart said he expects to push the envelope even more in Picard‘s second season. “There was no socializing [between the actors] for the first five months — we were shooting,” Stewart said. “When we came to the end of the series, we had promotional activities to engage with, and we were traveling together on airplanes and got to know one another so much better. This is going to be a new element in Season Two, that there is a lot of mutual respect everywhere. If you know you can take risks, and there is a network around you that if you crash land, they will catch you, it’s a wonderful feeling. That’s how I feel now. I feel safe.”

Star Trek: Picard‘s first season is streaming now on CBS All Access.