Watch: Deleted Star Trek: Picard scene with Picard speaking French

Star Trek: Picard deleted a scene from its first season that included Admiral Jean-Luc Picard speaking French.

Way back when casting was underway for the next captain of the Enterprise for Star Trek: The Next Generation, the producers wanted a French captain. When Patrick Stewart auditioned for the role, he affected a French accent that wasn’t very good so when he was offered the role, he was told to drop the accent. And Captain Jean-Luc Picard kept the French name but used an English accent to suit Stewart. The French is back and not just as an accent in a scene from Picard that didn’t make it to air.

In a deleted scene from the first season (and maybe even the first episode) of Picard (shared by IGN), the admiral is seen walking with his dog, Number One, through the vineyards at his chalet in France. He talks to the dog and teases him about pretending not to know French. The scene continues with Picard observing a worker making fun of Laris (Orla Brady). And that leads him to confront him to let the worker know that he saw what had happened.

The deleted scene in Star Trek: Picard shows the vast difference between this series and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In the scene, one of the workers is making fun of Laris’ ears as she is a Romulan while another worker looks on, and that angers Picard enough to threaten them all with their jobs. This is a telling moment in the series as there was no love lost between Starfleet and the Romulans on The Next Generation. And were this scene to have been kept, it would have added a little more emphasis for how Picard had changed as well. It also added a little spark to the admiral that would have been welcome, too.