Star Trek: James McAvoy down to play a young Jean-Luc Picard

James McAvoy has experience playing younger versions of iconic Patrick Stewart characters, he likes Star Trek, and Hollywood loves reboots. It just makes sense.

It wasn’t that long ago that Paramount rebooted the original Star Trek series with a new crop of movies, with Chris Pine now playing Captain Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock and Zoe Saldana as Uhura. That movie series has kind of stalled, but there’s lots more Star Trek out there to reboot if there’s interest; what about a reboot of Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example?

Well, that might be a little weird given that Patrick Stewart is once again playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Picard, but it could happen. And if it does, one man is poised to pounce on the lead role: James McAvoy.

Or at least he was joking about it Jimmy Fallon on a new, quarantine-friendly episode of The Tonight Show. Is there a world, Fallon asked, where McAvoy would step into Patrick Stewart’s Starfleet uniform? “Jimmy, that is the only world that exists, in which I will play Jean-Luc Picard,” McAvoy said. “Any other world is just an alternate reality in a bad episode of Star Trek. It’s happening! And if they don’t hire me, I am gonna make it on my own.”

McAvoy continued, lyrically: “I’m doing the virtual lockdown equivalent of rubbing my scent all over Patrick’s face and saying, ‘This territory is mine! All other bald actors can f*** off! It’s me!'”

Poetry straight from the tap.

Of course, Fallon brought up the question in the first place because McAvoy famously took over another of Patrick Stewart’s iconic roles when he was cast as a young Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men movies, starting with 2011’s X-Men: First Class. Because apparently Professor X did have hair at some point.

McAvoy is a Star Trek fan, too; in quarantine, he’s joined in making a Trek parody spoof called Star Force: Sci-Fisolation, where he and other actors gleefully spoof the final frontier:

“It’s a spoof, a homage…. It’s a sp-omage!” McAvoy said. “It’s a spoof of Star Trek but we try to keep it as sci-fi related as possible.”

So there you go: all the pieces are in place. McAvoy loves Star Trek, he has experience playing younger versions of Patrick Stewart characters, and Hollywood loves rebooting things. Now all someone has to do is pull the trigger.

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h/t Metro