James McAvoy Pitched a Young Picard Series — "Mutiny on the Stargazer" — and Says It Nearly Happened

James McAvoy has a career ambition he states without embarrassment: "All I really want to do in my career is play young versions of Patrick Stewart." As Radio Times reported from his appearance on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Scottish actor revealed that the ambition nearly produced an entire television series. McAvoy pitched the Star Trek producers a standalone season called Mutiny on the Stargazer, built around the young Jean-Luc Picard — Stewart's other defining role — and by his account it came close to being made. "We nearly did it," McAvoy said on the podcast, in remarks carried by Radio Times, TrekMovie and Nerdist.

The pitch: a first command and a lifelong secret

The concept, as McAvoy described it, is a one-off standalone season set when Picard took over as captain of the USS Stargazer — his first command, decades before the Enterprise-D. "It followed the captain when he took over as captain of the Stargazer, and what actually happened, and the secret that he's been holding his entire career," McAvoy said in the Radio Times account. He declined to reveal what the secret was. The pitch's reception, in his telling, was warm: he pitched it directly to the Star Trek team, "and they were well into it," but, as he put it in the TrekMovie account, "we had logistical issues that meant we couldn't do it." Nerdist's report of the same conversation adds that he pitched the season for Paramount+ and that the failure came down to scheduling and availability rather than interest: "everyone just couldn't get it done," as Men's Journal summarized his explanation.

The Stargazer is a loaded choice of setting, and McAvoy clearly knows it. As TrekMovie's background notes explain, Picard's Stargazer years were established in Star Trek: The Next Generation's first-season episode "The Battle," in which a Ferengi officer, DaiMon Bok, returns the lost ship to Picard as part of a revenge plot rooted in the Battle of Maxia, where Picard destroyed the Ferengi vessel that had attacked him — a vessel commanded by Bok's son, who was killed in the engagement. In canon, Picard commanded the Stargazer for more than twenty years, assumed command young, counted his best friend Jack Crusher as his first officer, and lost the ship roughly nine years before taking command of the Enterprise-D, as Nerdist's account lays out. Almost none of those twenty years has ever been dramatized on screen; the era lives in novels and implication. A limited series set inside it would have had a famous ending to write toward and a nearly blank map to write across.

The Stewart succession, twice attempted

The casting logic is what makes the story more than a curiosity. McAvoy has already performed this exact maneuver once: he played the young Charles Xavier in four X-Men films, inheriting on screen the role Stewart originated — the same dynamic of a younger actor reverse-engineering a beloved performance's mannerisms into an earlier self. It is, as Martin Cid Magazine's account put it, a franchise career built on inheriting another star's signature roles, and McAvoy's own framing embraces it completely: "I've got this whole story about a young Picard that I love," he said, per Radio Times. "I just go to bed and think about it at night," he added in the version of the quote carried by Yardbarker's report. His fandom predates the pitch, too — Radio Times recalls that during 2020 lockdown he parodied Star Trek in a homemade film, Star Force: Sci-Fisolation, made with Caitríona Balfe, and later told Jimmy Fallon he was desperate to do it properly.

Where it fits in the franchise's near-miss file

Star Trek's history is thick with almost-projects — Yardbarker's account places the McAvoy pitch in a line running from the 1970s' unmade Star Trek: Phase II to the more recent Star Trek: Legacy, which has never received a greenlight. What distinguishes this one is how complete it sounds: a title, a closed-season structure, a defined setting, a star who had already proven the concept in another franchise, and a reception the actor describes as enthusiastic. The streaming-era franchise has also shown a clear appetite for exactly this move — Star Trek: Strange New Worlds built a hit out of Captain Pike's Enterprise in the years before Kirk, as Martin Cid Magazine noted — which makes the logistical failure read less like a verdict on the idea and more like a scheduling casualty. A one-off season is the most revivable format in television. McAvoy has now described the pitch, in detail, on one of the industry's most-listened-to podcasts, which is either an epitaph for the idea or the most public possible way of keeping it alive. Given that he says he goes to bed thinking about the story, it would be unwise to bet on the epitaph.

The demand side of the argument has recent evidence behind it. Stewart himself carried Star Trek: Picard for three seasons on the same streaming service, proof that the character anchors a series even in stories set at the far end of his life. A young-Picard season would have approached the same audience from the opposite direction: the command years that The Next Generation only ever referenced in dialogue and one famous flashback device. Between Picard's run and Strange New Worlds' success with prequel storytelling, the franchise has spent the streaming era demonstrating that its viewers reward exactly the kind of excavation McAvoy was proposing — canonical gaps, filled carefully, with a performer the audience already trusts in the chair.