Although it made him a household name and led to a hugely successful Hollywood career, Patrick Stewart wasn't the biggest star attached to Star Trek: The Next Generation when it first aired in 1987. Patrick Stewart wasn't Gene Roddenberry's preferred choice for the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, and he doubted that the classically trained actor would be a good fit for the captain's chair. As Star Trek author Mark A. Altman observed in Peter Holstrom's book The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek, Patrick Stewart didn't have many strong Hollywood credits to his name, and this may have further impeded his chances of being cast as Picard.
Although Stewart had predominantly done theater and had roles in, to quote Altman, "bad movies like Lifeforce", he had also been in some of the most critically acclaimed British TV dramas of the 1970s and 80s. Stewart had appeared in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I, Claudius, and Smiley's People for the BBC, but in the pre-streaming age, these seminal TV dramas hadn't been as widely seen in the US. This meant that the actor playing the captain of the Enterprise was less well-known than those playing his subordinates.
