James McAvoy is no stranger to the younger version of a character first brought to life by Patrick Stewart, having played Charles Xavier both before and after the bald era in X-Men: First Class, Days of Future Past, Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, but he’s remained keen to repeat the same trick with Jean-Luc Picard.
On multiple occasions throughout the last couple of years, McAvoy has semi-jokingly put himself forward to play the youthful Picard in Star Trek. Not only is the actor a longtime fan of the sci-fi franchise, but he’s more experienced than anybody else when it comes to embodying pop culture icons first driven to live-action prominence by Stewart.
However, in a recent interview with Collider, McAvoy admitted that he’s probably a little overqualified to keep mining Stewart’s back catalogue for inspiration, even if he he’d still be game should the opportunity ever come his way.
“If you ever want to do a young Jean-Luc Picard, I’m your man. I’ve successfully been Patrick, actually, and balded up, although maybe again, the young Jean-Luc wouldn’t be bald. But yeah, no, maybe I’m overqualified for it, though. That’s the other thing. Do you know what I mean? It’s too easy, it’s too obvious a choice. So maybe that turns people off from it.”
Picard has been renewed for second and third seasons, so we might end up seeing flashbacks to days gone by when the Starfleet officer was at the beginning of his ascendancy up the ranks. However, McAvoy probably isn’t going to be the guy to make it happen, and it’d probably be too distracting for audiences anyway.