The 1996 scene Patrick Stewart refused to shoot: “It was a dumb idea to begin with”
Over the course of his career, Patrick Stewart has shown that he’s game for just about anything, which illustrates just how affronted he was at being pitched an idea he had no intention of ever shooting.
This is the esteemed legend of stage and screen who posted an image of himself lying in a bath wearing a lobster costume on social media, delivered an increasingly unhinged voice performance in American Dad!, masterfully sent himself up on Extras, and suggested that he deserved an invitation to the White House for introducing the concept of putting two teabags in the one mug to America.
Needless to say, Stewart doesn’t seem like a man who’d be overly precious on set. And yet, when the time came to reprise one of his signature roles on the big screen, the first wave of suggestions floated his way by the writing team were so egregious and so quickly shot down that it was right back to the drawing board.
In The Next Generation crew’s second feature-length outing, 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the gang engage in some time-travelling shenanigans to stop the Borg from rewriting history. While that story point had been in place from the beginning, it took a little bit of refinement before everyone was on the same page.
Screenwriters Brannon Braga and Ronald D Moore wanted to use the Borg, one of The Next Generation‘s most popular and fearsome antagonists, while producer Rick Berman wanted to use time travel. Instead of arguing about it, the two concepts were combined in the script, but they might have been better off running it past Stewart beforehand.
In First Contact, the Enterprise mob travel from the 24th century to the 21st to thwart the Borg’s nefarious scheme, but they were originally supposed to travel much further than that. So far, in fact, that they ran into trouble when Stewart, despite being an experienced Shakespearean performer, discovered that the narrative had a non-negotiable.
“I was eager to do time travel again, because I was stinging from that Nexus crap in Generations. Also, we were waiting for First Contact to really dip back into the Borg,” Braga explained. “But, I have to say, our initial ideas for the movie were pretty lame. We were talking about the Borg travelling back to medieval times, the 1500s. It was just insane.”
Even within the context of Star Trek, it does sound insane, but the leading man wasn’t having it. “We talked about that for a few weeks,” the scribe added. “And Patrick got wind of it through Rick, and he refused to wear tights on the big screen. That was his quote. But it was a dumb idea to begin with.”
Stewart had no issues squeezing himself into a pair of tights when he was treading the boards, but doing it in a movie? That’s an entirely different matter. Clearly, he’s a trousers-only kind of fella, and when cooler heads prevailed, and he’d made his disdain perfectly clear, First Contact was eventually hammered into shape and transformed into something that he didn’t loathe the idea of.
