I don't know who else they could have gotten at the time, but sitting here watching Nemesis on AMC, I think Tom Hardy looks more like John DeLancie than Patrick Stewart. Hardy DeLancie Maybe he should have played a young Q instead of young Picard?
James Marsters (Spike from 'Buffy') was also up for the role and quite frankly would have been a better fit visually and acting-wise.
I was just thinking the same thing when I saw this thread title. He wasn't actually British, but he'd just spent about 6 years playing a guy from England at that point, and a good villain to boot (until they ruined his character around the fifth season, but that's a topic for another forum ). After all the great work he did on that series, he deserved a good movie role, which he still hasn't gotten to this day. I hate how so many actors (and many Star Trek actors are a perfect example) do such amazing work on a TV show and then can't have good movie careers after the series ends.
The Spike guy would've been great, but I'd've been happy if the clone was aged up to near Stewart in years, because Timothy Dalton would have been fantastic, as he is already like a much-better looking version of Stewart, and at least there'd've been the history of Dalton being in well-known continuations that sunk or nearly sunk franchises (his grossly underrated tenure as Bond, plus his turn as Rhett Butler in the TV GWTW sequel.)
Oh come on, you can't call the "Gone with the Wind" sequel something that "sank a franchise". There's no way "Gone with the Wind" could have been a franchise anyway, even if it had been a theatrical release with a top notch director and cast. The original is just way too iconic and powerful as a standalone feature for any sequels to seem necessary. It's the same thing with those sequels to "2001: A Space Odyseey" and "Psycho" (1960). The sequel to "2001" was probably as good as a sequel to that movie could possibly be (I speak my own opinion as well as what seems to be the general consensus about it), and while I haven't seen them, I heard the "Psycho" sequels were solid too. Nonetheless, the fact remains that neither of those movies needed a sequel or franchise given how monumental they were as their own self-contained stories and the same goes for "Gone with the Wind". To get back on topic...another obvious sign that those who made the movie (including the writer, despite claiming to be a big Star Trek fan) made it haphazardly and didn't have the knowledge and attention to detail true Trekkies would have is the fact that they cast someone largely based on how much they thought he resembled Patrick Stewart bald, even though there's an episode where he's shown with hair in a flashback which takes places long after his academy days. I know it could reasonably be dimissed as "fanboy nitpicking", but stuff like this (another is Chris Pine having blue eyes in "Star Trek" and Jessica Alba being cast as The Invisible Girl in "Fantastic Four" and having to have her hair and eyes artificially coloured because of how little she resembles the character) drives me nuts. Of all the people they could cast in the world, they have to pick people who lack a resemblence to their character so dramatically? Maybe if they were casting some of the best actors in the world (i.e. the Meryl Streeps) it would be justified, but this casting is being done with people who are unknowns or young actors who have barely established themselves.
Dalton has a history of going where smarter folks did not tread (and I'm saying this as a devotee of his work), so yeah, franchise-sinker is going too far, but you GOTTA know that playing Rhett Butler is death when you do it second ... hell, history had already shown how bad you could be treated for playing the lead in a continuation of CASABLANCA, given how David Soul's career disappeared after he tried that ill-considered trick.
Okay, this is kind of nuts going off-topic like this after I put so much effort into getting back on topic, but now I gotta ask...as a fan of Dalton, how did you like seeming him in "Hot Fuzz"? I thought it was a great role for him. I haven't seen many of his roles (including his turn as James Bond) and I thought this was the best role I've seen him in since his villainous turn in the vastly underrated "The Rocketeer". He seems to be very good at playing villains. I loved the way he almost gleefully made his villainy obvious in "Hot Fuzz" doing stuff like showing up at the crime scene with a huge smile on his face. I felt he was one of the highlights of the movie.
If Timothy Dalton was the right age to play a clone of Picard, why not just get Patrick Stewart to do it? He's a dead ringer for the guy who plays Picard!
I thought he was terrific in HOT FUZZ, he seemed to have more vigor than one would expect, and the 'eyeglint' is still there
Why not? Letting Stewart pull double duty couldn't have made it any more of a train wreck than it already was.
That might have been kinda cool...sort of like a TNG version of "The Enemy Within", except I think if they'd had to do it, it would have been best to do it when Patrick Stewart was younger. The other problem would be that having Stewart and Spiner BOTH playing clones of themselves would have seemed really redundant, although similar to that other post's suggestion, I can say the plot was redundant already due to both Picard and Data having dopplegangers anyway, even if they weren't all played by the same actors.
Having both Stewart and Spiner play their doppelgangers would have only reinforced the notion of the TNG movies being totally Picard- and Data-centric, at the expense of all the other characters.
I see it is time to dust off part of my Nemesis rant. In the film Mr. Stewart should have been the one with multiple roles. No offense to Mr. Spiner or his fans, but we've already seen him do multiple roles several times in TNG; Datalore, Brothers, and Descent I and II. In the movie as they picked up pieces of B-4 what Trek fan didn't sit in the audience asking themselves, "Lore? Why isn't Worf, or anyone else for that matter, mentioning Lore?" We're sure it was supposed to be some sort of dramatic parallel to Picard's relationship with his own clone, but it tanked. If you're going to do a story about Picard facing an evil clone of himself have Picard facing an evil clone of himself. We're sure the reason the Paramount executives decided to use Tom Hardy as Shinzon was to bring in all the screaming, Orlando Bloom loving, teenybopper girls. However, if Stewart had played both Picard and the clone Shinzon you would have had a movie on par with TOS's episode Mirror, Mirror. Warmest Wishes, Whoa Nellie
Yeah, I tend to agree that if Stewart met his 'mirror' Data should not have met his doppleganger, nor should he have died. I think that we're all missing the great missed opportunity here: Nemesis should have been a regular/mirror universe crossover. And I don't mean the DS9 mirror universe - I mean one where there is an Enterprise-E - one of the myriad universes seen in 'Parallels' perhaps? Hell, maybe the Enterprise-E should have met the Enterprise-D from circa 'Encounter at Farpoint.' Shades of 'Yesterday's Enterprise' meets 'All Good Things.' In case you haven't picked up on it, I think all of those in the paragraph above this one are terrible ideas, but no less terrible than 'let's have a younger clone of Picard as the enemy' was. The idea of being forced to face the things that make you who you are was a good one, but surely given time and allowed to come up with something more original, a better plot could have been found. Oh, and if they wanted younger, it should have been James Marsters. Nothing against Hardy. He just didn't look the part, or seem particularly threatening. Something else that undermined the threat for me was his age - being so young it seems like Picard should have had to face his own aging more. What really sucks is that if 'Insurrection' had been handled better it could have tied in nicely with it. It was like they were trying to emulate TWoK without completely ripping it off. Oh, wait.
I never much cared for the B4 storyline and thought the film would've improved without it. I always liked the idea that the actor who played young Picard in Rascals (and Rene', his nephew in Family) would've been a great choice to play Shinzon in his 20's at the beginning of the film. Then, as his conditioned worsened, he would've aged rapidly at which point, Stewart would've taken over the Shinzon role.
Now that's a good idea - another actor to start, then Stewart suddenly takes over after a 'growth spurt.' That would have been quite dramatic, IMHO.
I was going to say that sounded like a cheesy idea, but then I remembered that they already got away with something similar in Trek 3 when the younger Spock grew into Leonard Nimoy. So, perhaps it might have worked. As for James Marsters, I don't know. I love him as Spike and would like to see him get more movie roles, but to me he does not look that much like Stewart.
While I'm in agreement that having Stewart play the rapidly aging Shinzon would have been better than Tom Hardy with varicose veins tattooed on his head, let's also pause to consider that all we're doing here is suggesting different fabrics for the new drapes we want to install on the Titanic. As much as Tom Hardy's performance didn't work for me, the script was still by far the weakest link in NEM.