Jean-Luc Picard
fictional Star Trek character
Jean-Luc Picard is a fictional character in the Star Trek franchise, most often seen as the commanding officer of the Federation starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D). Played by Patrick Stewart, Picard has appeared in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) and the premiere episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as well as the feature films Star Trek Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). He is also featured as the central character in the show Star Trek: Picard (2020–2023).
Casting and design
After the success of the contemporary Star Trek feature films, a new Star Trek television series featuring a new cast was announced on October 10, 1986. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry named Picard for (one or both of) the twin brothers Auguste Piccard and Jean Piccard, 20th-century Swiss scientists.
Patrick Stewart, who has a background in live theater at the Royal Shakespeare Company, was initially considered for the role of Data. In the early 1970s, UCSB professor Homer Swander had recruited Stewart to help teach American college students about William Shakespeare. It was because of this connection that in 1986, Stewart was visiting UCLA to assist professor David Rodes with a series of public lectures on Shakespeare. At one of those lectures, producer Robert H. Justman immediately recognized that Stewart was the ideal candidate for Picard.
Roddenberry originally did not want to cast Stewart as Picard; he had envisioned an actor who was "masculine, virile, and had a lot of hair".
“Jean-Luc Picard” enters the record as fictional Star Trek character. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jean-Luc, Picard and fictional can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16276. VIAF identifies the subject as 17159697648503311970. The Library of Congress control number is n2020043758. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1701, 1994, 1996 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jean-Luc Picard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.