Patrick Stewart Would “Love” to Play Jean-Luc Picard in Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek

Just days after saying that he has “hung up the space suit” of Jean-Luc Picard and that he “cannot think of another instance in which” he might play the character again beyond some sort of 50-years-of-Trek reunion movie, Patrick Stewart has apparently already found a “brilliant” enough reason to scrap his plans of retiring from Star Trek. Following the news that J.J. Abrams and Quentin Tarantino are developing an R-rated Star Trek movie for Tarantino to direct, Stewart told THR that he loves Tarantino’s “sense of humor as a filmmaker” and said that it has long been one of his “dreams” to work with the legendary director.

I admire his work so much, and to be in a Tarantino film would give me so much satisfaction. So, if he is going to direct something to do with ‘Star Trek’ and there was the possibility of dear old Jean-Luc showing up again and doing that for Mr. Tarantino, I would embrace it.

Tarantino has already met with several writers, with Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) rumored to be the current “frontrunner” to pen the script. It’s unclear how Tarantino’s movie will fit into Paramount’s current plans for the Star Trek franchise. It’s possible that Tarantino might eschew the classic series for a movie set in the timeline of The Next Generation, which would help the studio expand the brand beyond Abrams’ rebooted vision (and allow Stewart to return!). In a 2015 interview with Nerdist, Tarantino cited the 1990 TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” as one of his favorites and mentioned how individual episodes from the series could be expanded into full-length movies.