Who Should Play Picard?
So it’s inevitable: in the next ten to fifteen years, there will be another reboot of Star Trek, and there will be someone’s take on Picard.
Our question: who should play Picard?
The criteria are that:
a) This will be roughly ten years from now, yet somehow they’ll pick a current actor. Just go with that.
b) Said actor will have to be in his mid-forties, older, about the same age Picard was when he started. (They could reboot with a young brash Picard learning his stuff at Starfleet Academy, but that’s too close to the recent reboot and too samey-same. They’re gonna want to distinguish.)
So. Which actor should we go with?
I personally would prefer Viggo Mortensen, dragged screaming out of actor’s retirement, because he’s got that reluctant gravitas you need to pull off the Picard. Yet Gini – a huge Viggo fan, it must be said – says that Viggo’s voice is too nasal to pull off the resonance of a Picard. Erin says she’d like Daniel Day-Lewis to do it, as would I, if only to see what kind of crazed preparations he’d make to live as a starship captain.
Daniel Craig was suggested, but there’s no way I could buy this guy as a man who negotiates first.
The one really interesting idea was race-swapping it to get Idris Elba to play the role, which I think is pretty good; he’s got the deep voice, he’s got that gravitas, and he’d be about the right age when the time comes. But I also worry it’d be seen more as a riff on Captain Sisko, who’s also got a rumbly voice and a quasi-Shakespearean delivery (though no patch on Patrick Stewart), so there’d have to be a lot of careful character writing.
But who do you think? All nerd battles are heartily encouraged.
I think Idris Elba could work really well. I don’t know that Sisko is as widely known as Picard so I’m not sure that it’d be a problem for him to be played by a black actor. Paterson Joseph could also work, but is somewhat more from left-field, as he’s less widely known. Chiwetel Ejiofor is another possibility.
If we’re not going to race swap, then what about Kenneth Branagh? Similar Shakespearean origins to Stewart and a good range. Also, if gender swaps don’t cause comparisons to Voyager, Helen Mirren could pull it off.
If you want to show Picard in a more formative/younger period, rather than zapping straight into the point of his career when he’s riding high, then I think Jamie Bamber could work quite well – his role in BSG shows that he’s up for genre stuff but I don’t know whether his appearance in a different franchise poses a problem. James McAvoy played a young but slightly more arrogant Patrick Stewart quite well in X-Men: First Class, so he could probably repeat the trick in a TNG reboot.
Dominic Cooper should definitely be given the role of Commander Riker, though. With Justin Beiber as Wesley Crusher, naturally.
Can we have Rachel Weisz for the reboot of Voyager?
If just anybody could audition for the role of young Picard, I’d love to. I can do a good impersonation of Patrick Stewart, and I’ve been told by certain people that I look like a younger version of him. But on a serious note, whoever plays Picard, I’d also love to see Jessica Chastain or Molly C. Quinn play Beverly Crusher. I can’t decide who would play the other characters, but if any of you have ideas, go ahead and say them.