Few actors build a franchise career on inheriting another star’s signature role, and James McAvoy would like to do it twice. After four films as the younger Charles Xavier, the part Patrick Stewart originated in the X-Men franchise, McAvoy says he tried to cross over to Stewart’s other defining character, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, with a Star Trek series about the officer’s early years, and that it came close to happening.

As Deadline reported, the Golden Globe nominee revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he had pitched a limited series titled Mutiny On the Stargazer. “That was a whole idea I had I pitched to the Star Trek people as well, and we nearly did it,” McAvoy said. “I’ve got a whole story about an early Picard. All I really want to do in my career is play young versions of Patrick.”

The pitch was built as a closed story rather than an open-ended run. McAvoy described it as “a one-off standalone season” set “when he took over as captain of the Stargazer and what actually happened, and the secret he’s been holding his entire career.” The reception, he said, was warm: “they were into it, but we had logistical issues that meant we couldn’t do it.” He did not reveal the secret, and Deadline’s account does not name who heard the pitch.

The Stargazer is a loaded choice. In Star Trek lore it was Picard’s first command, the ship he lost at the Battle of Maxia, a backstory Star Trek: The Next Generation set up in its first season. The period has already been mined in print: author Michael Jan Friedman’s six-part Star Trek: Stargazer book series explored Picard’s first command. And the streaming-era franchise has shown an appetite for going back in time, with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds following Captain Christopher Pike’s Enterprise in the years before Kirk.

McAvoy’s claim to the territory is the X-Men lineage. He took over Professor Xavier from Stewart in the prequels X-Men: First Class, Days of Future Past, Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix. Stewart originated the live-action role in X-Men and played him through X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine and Logan, and the two shared the character in Days of Future Past.

Stewart played Picard for seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1994, and returned for three seasons of Star Trek: Picard between 2020 and 2023. Friedman’s Stargazer novels were published between 2002 and 2004. McAvoy’s X-Men run spanned 2011 to 2019, and Stewart is set to play Xavier again in Avengers: Doomsday, which opens in theaters Dec. 18.

For now, Mutiny On the Stargazer lives where McAvoy says he keeps it: a story he loves enough that he goes to bed thinking about it at night.

Tags: Brad Falchuk, Peter Dinklage, Jo Koy, Star Trek, James McAvoy, Jean-Luc Picard