Having been in the acting business long enough to see and do pretty much everything there is to be seen and done, Patrick Stewart felt confident enough to pass judgement on an unproven co-star who’d just finished up giving a turgid performance in an altogether terrible movie.
Of course, anyone who follows Star Trek will be completely aware that Tom Hardy went on to accomplish great things, become an A-list superstar, and cement himself as one of the finest talents of his generation in the years to come, but the longtime Jean-Luc Picard wasn’t exactly sold on his career prospects when Nemesis called it a wrap.
Reflecting on his experience working with Hardy in his memoir Making It So (per Insider), the esteemed thespian even remarked to his colleagues that they’d likely never hear his name in Hollywood circles again.
“Nemesis, which came out in 2002, was particularly weak. I didn’t have a single exciting scene to play, and the actor who portrayed the movie’s villain, Shinzon, was an odd, solitary young man from London. His name was Tom Hardy. Tom wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level. Never said, ‘Good morning,’ never said, ‘Goodnight,’ and spent the hours he wasn’t needed on set in his trailer with his girlfriend. He was by no means hostile — it was just challenging to establish any rapport with him.
On the evening Tom wrapped his role, he characteristically left without ceremony or niceties, simply walking out of the door. As it closed, I said quietly to Brent [Spiner] and Jonathan [Frakes], ‘And there goes someone I think we shall never hear of again.’ It gives me nothing but pleasure that Tom has proven me so wrong.”
We’d love to be a fly on the wall were the two ever to reconnect, but let’s admit it; anyone who saw Nemesis at the time of its release would never have been able to predict Hardy’s trajectory from then on out, and that probably includes the man himself.