The Big Picture
- Even talented actors like Patrick Stewart and Tom Hardy can be involved in bad movies, with Star Trek: Nemesis being a prime example.
- During Nemesis‘ filming, Stewart found the young Tom Hardy to be an odd and solitary presence on set, and didn’t think he had a future in show business.
- Star Trek: Nemesis failed to do justice by its cast and characters, but a young, “terrified” Tom Hardy gave the best performance he could despite the material’s constraints.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that every actor must make a bad movie at least once. Even the great Patrick Stewart is no exception, with 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis the ideal case in point. Popular consensus has dubbed Nemesis, the final Star Trek: The Next Generation feature film, a dour slog that failed to provide the series or its characters with a proper send-off. Although Nemesis isn’t utterly unsalvageable as a piece of entertainment, the movie’s cumulative failures stifle the cast’s bright chemistry and Stewart’s ever-present gravitas. If actors as proficient as those leading The Next Generation struggled, then imagine the difficulties faced by a young Tom Hardy. The future Academy Award nominee landed the role of Nemesis‘ villain Shinzon, Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s clone, when his career was in its infancy. Shinzon’s a thankless role to begin with, but from Patrick Stewart’s perspective, the writing for Hardy’s character wasn’t the only hiccup the burgeoning actor faced while filming Nemesis.
What Did Patrick Stewart Say About Tom Hardy’s Time on ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’?
According to Patrick Stewart’s recently published autobiography, Making It So, Stewart didn’t think Tom Hardy had a future in show business. Describing Hardy as an “odd, solitary young man from London,” Stewart explains: “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.” Due to this, when Hardy concluded his time on the Nemesis set by “simply walking out of the door,” Stewart “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.”
Calling Star Trek: Nemesis the “bane” of The Next Generation canon is a terrible pun given Hardy’s role in The Dark Knight Rises, but it’s not inaccurate. Out of the four Next Generation feature films, Patrick Stewart describes Nemesis in Making It So as “particularly weak. I didn’t have a single exciting scene to play.” He’s not the only cast member with that opinion. His co-stars Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, and Gates McFadden in particular shared their frustration with the movie to The New York Times before the premiere of Star Trek: Picard Season 3. “None of us knew that was going to be our last outing,” Burton said. “So there was always, at least for me, a sense of a missed opportunity, something unfulfilled.”
Thankfully, reuniting for Picard Season 3 gave the actors their proper, long-overdue conclusion. Two decades earlier, however, they had to navigate the negligent chaos that is Nemesis. The idea of Picard having an evil clone is odd, sure, but Star Trek‘s empathetic humanism pulled off far odder ideas with aplomb. It’s Nemesis‘ execution where everything falls apart, including its concept. The script’s lack of thematic consistency and narrative cohesion undoes any goodwill established by a few successful character moments. Ultimately, Star Trek: Nemesis failed everyone. That includes Tom Hardy, who would later share he felt “terrified” making the film.
Tom Hardy Showed Early Potential in ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’
Tom Hardy’s onscreen presence is one of captivating uniqueness. His exacting gravity feels both heightened yet steeped in naturalism, a combination making him an exquisite scene stealer capable of invigorating any project. That said, script quality and directorial choices determine whether an immensely talented actor can salvage the mediocre material they’ve been handed. The fresh-faced Hardy of Star Trek: Nemesis didn’t have any clout to wield against those factors. He was in his early 20s with just three feature-length credits to his name, but they were impressive credits: Ridley Scott‘s war film Black Hawk Down and HBO’s World War II miniseries Band of Brothers. Hardy gives the not-insubstantial role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s clone his all. It’s no fault of his that Nemesis director Stuart Baird and John Logan‘s sadly nonsensical script do Hardy a dual disservice: they bury his distinctive qualities and dilute the nature versus nuture concept of two warring Picards into “here’s a bald British guy wearing squeaky purple leather.”
Yet if one approaches Nemesis in good faith, Hardy’s creative sensibilities still glimmer through to an impressive degree. His Shinzon is exaggerated enough to border on camp and doesn’t read as an alternate Picard, but Hardy’s affected vowels and unblinking eyes simmer with anger. He fills in the script’s blanks by bringing a fascinated and almost ravenous intensity to a boy who’s lived in a famous man’s shadow. “All I have are my personal feelings,” Shinzon spits at one point, and Hardy’s performance sells that emotional desolation: this version of Picard was formed through torture, poverty, and rage instead of empathy, privilege, and the arts. As every actor should, Hardy does his best to show the human inside the monster; he’s engaging to watch despite the restraining material. Hardy’s screen test is actually more measured and detailed than his final performance, which is proof positive how much the wrong director can suppress the right instincts.
Tom Hardy Beat the Odds Despite ‘Star Trek: Nemesis’ Wasting His Talents
When it comes to Hardy’s reticence on the Star Trek: Nemesis set, there’s a simple but complex answer. Speaking with Total Film for the magazine’s April 2014 issue, Hardy said of Nemesis, “Every day on that set, I was terrified – which worked for the character anyway. You can’t hide that, the camera will pick it up. I was genuinely out of my depth. The whole thing was, ‘How can I do this?’ I took it very seriously.” That same year in an interview with the BBC, Hardy spoke about the difference between reading a script and the realities of filming: “It’s one thing to see something on the page and get very, very excited. Everything’s so much better when you’re on your own in front of the bathroom mirror. The practicalities were I’ve never been to Hollywood before, never worked on a franchise like this, and I’m relatively inexperienced to be honest. So I was terrified of failure.”
Stepping onto the set of a franchise blockbuster without prior experience is harrowing enough. Feeling worried, insecure, shy, and any combination thereof in Hollywood, a networking-heavy industry, just compounds the situation. Star Trek: Nemesis is the kind of movie that could unfairly end a new actor’s career. It’s to Hardy’s credit that his flourishing resume post-Nemesis defied the odds all the way to an Oscar nomination (The Revenant), a big budget trilogy of his own (Venom), and multiple Christopher Nolan collaborations. Hardy went from the cloned villain in the movie branded Star Trek‘s worst offense to a leading man of great renown. First impressions matter, but they can also be wrong.
