Deep Homage puts Patrick Stewart as Shinzon from Star Trek: Nemesis

If deepfake technology existed in 2002, then Patrick Stewart could’ve played the role of Jean-Luc Picard and Shinzon with ease in Star Trek: Nemesis.

Star Trek: Nemesis was a film that missed widely despite its intriguing premise of a clone of Jean-Luc Picard fighting against the U.S.S. Enterprise and Starfleet. It introduced fans everywhere to the awesome looking, but rarely used Remans, and original plans even had Jeri Ryan reprising Seven of NIne for the role. While it’s hard to make that movie great, imagine what it would’ve been like if deepfake technology existed, and producers used it to make Patrick Stewart both Jean-Luc Picard and Shinzon.

Well, Deep Homage wanted to see what that would look like and created a video of that very same idea. In it, the clone of Picard faces off with the original in a chilling yet exciting exchange.

The role of Shinzon was originally played by then 24-year-old British actor and future tormentor of Batman, Tom Hardy. Hardy was nearly half the size as fans would know him to be these days but his acting was none-the-less impressive anyway. Hardy had a real captivating ability and played off of Stewart very well.

The clip above still has Hardy’s voice but no longer his face, as Deep Homage replaced it with Stewart’s. In an ideal world, to pull off such an effect, you would’ve de-aged Stewart’s face as well, similar to Bruce Willis in Looper.

At the end of the day, however, while it’s a novel concept, the problem wasn’t that Hary didn’t look enough like Picard, they’re 40 years apart in age, it was believable enough. The problem was the general script. No amount of deepfaking can fix the script for one of the most maligned Star Trek films of all time.