Sir Patrick Stewart has cited his work on the movie Logan as one of the driving factors behind his return to the character of Jean-Luc Picard.

StarTrek.com reports that Stewart talked about the film while speaking to an audience at Destination Star Trek last weekend. He explained that he had “absolutely no intention of returning to Star Trek” and that his initial meeting with producers was chiefly about turning them down as politely as possible. He said the only reason he even agreed to attend the meeting was due to his respect for the people who had asked him, including Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman. He said, “They listened to me talk for 20 minutes or more while I explained to them all the reasons behind my saying no.”

But persistence paid off on the part of the producers; when Stewart asked for their ideas for the show in writing, so he could study them, he said, “A couple of days later, I got 35 pages of single-spaced writing and I was fascinated by it.”

It was enough to get Stewart to agree to a second meeting, into which he brought “specific terms and conditions” that might convince him to return. Some of those were borne from his previous work on Logan, one of the sequels in Fox’s X-Men movie series. He said, “I referenced X-Men and particularly the final movie that Hugh Jackman and myself did, Logan, as [to] what I had in mind. Logan was nothing like any of the other X-Men movies that had come before. [...] And so, I challenged Alex Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman to come up with ideas for a completely different world than the one that we had known 17 or 18 years earlier.”

Apparently, they rose to the challenge. Stewart said of what came out of those talks: “[Star Trek: Picard is] better than being a return to Jean-Luc, a return to the franchise. It felt like a brand new project. And I was fascinated because, in those 18 years, Picard had grown older and Patrick, myself, had grown older. My life, in many respects, is very different. And I felt if we could bring all of those elements into a new series about Picard then I would be content. And this is the end result of that.”

Star Trek: Picard is currently in post-production and due to premiere on January 23rd, 2020.