Photo: When Patrick Stewart wore a wig for his Star Trek audition

Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise is bald. This is known to every Star Trek fan, and even to people who have never watched an episode but absorbed the information anyway; it’s hard to miss.

And so long as Patrick Stewart was playing him, Jean-Luc Picard was always going to be bald; it’s kind of the guy’s signature. But Stewart very nearly didn’t play the character, because Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry apparently didn’t see a follicly challenged man in the captain’s chair on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This info comes from executive producer Rick Berman, who knew Stewart was the best man for the job. “We gotta push the English guy,” he remembered thinking during an interview.

The problem was Roddenberry, who can envision a future free from money and poverty where humans and alien races work together but apparently has trouble wrapping his head around the notion of a bald man in a leading role. “I started bugging Gene about the bald English guy,” Berman continued, recalling that Roddenberry eventually came around but insisted that Patrick Stewart wear a wig into his audition. “So Patrick made a phone call to London and got a very, very good wig made by one of the best theatrical wig makers in England. And he had the wig sent over.”

"Patrick came in, and somebody was there to help him and he put on the wig. And we brought him to read for [president of Paramount Network Television] John Pike at the studio…And at the end, Pike said, ‘Go with the English guy, but lose the wig.’ And that was the best three words we could have heard. He knew that Patrick was bald, and he had seen all the photographs of him, and we had played him a tape of Patrick’s clips of his work. And that was the story of casting Patrick, which I think was the most critical element of the show. That was the greatest sales point for The Next Generation."

And just like that, bald men everywhere had a hero they could look up to…but not directly at, cause that dome is shiny.

The photo of Captain Picard with hair isn’t what you’ve heard it is

Anyway, there does exist a photo of Stewart in his Starfleet uniform wearing a wig, widely circulated as a picture from this audition:

Ah, it looks wrong, doesn’t it?

In any case, while this is a picture of Captain Picard in a wig, it’s not from the audition. As Snopes.com points out, it’s an image from the season 5 episode “Violations,” which featured a flashback to a younger, more hirsute Picard.

You can see Stewart back in the saddle as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Picard, which has a second season coming down the pike on Paramount+.

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