Patrick Stewart didn’t think Tom Hardy would have a career after “odd, solitary” behaviour on Star Trek: Nemesis

One of Tom Hardy‘s first major roles found him starring alongside Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: Nemesis, but Hardy didn’t make a particularly good impression on Stewart at the time.

Patrick Stewart shared his thoughts about Star Trek: Nemesis in his new memoir, ‘Making It So.’ He found Nemesis to be “particularly weak” compared to Star Trek: First Contact. “I didn’t have a single exciting scene to play,” Stewart wrote, “and the actor who portrayed the movie’s villain, Shinzon, was an odd, solitary young man from London. His name was Tom Hardy.” Shinzon was a discarded clone of Jean-Luc Picard raised by Remans.

Stewart continued, “Tom wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level: never said ‘Good morning,’ never said ‘Good night,’ 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. On the evening Tom wrapped his role, he characteristically left without ceremony or niceties, simply walking out the door. As it closed, I said quietly to Brent [Spiner] and Jonathan [Frakes], ‘And there goes someone I think we shall never hear of again.’“

Of course, Tom Hardy’s career exploded just a few years later, and Patrick Stewart admitted that it gave him “nothing but pleasure” to have been proven so wrong. “He has flourished in such blockbusters as Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Legend, not to mention the TV series Peaky Blinders,” Stewart wrote. “My favorite of his movies, though, is Locke, in which he is the only actor on-screen, driving for nearly the entire duration of the film while taking calls from characters voiced by such actors as Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson, and Tom Holland. I would love to have dinner with him someday and get to know what’s going on inside that brain.“

The failure of Star Trek: Nemesis brought an end to Patrick Stewart’s time as Jean-Luc Picard, but he was eventually convinced to return for Star Trek: Picard, which he enjoyed so much that he approached Paramount about making a Picard movie.