Jonathan Frakes told listeners on the Dropping Names podcast that he and Patrick Stewart had offered to meet Stuart Baird during the making of Star Trek: Nemesis, only to be rebuffed: "Patrick and I all offered to have lunch with him, because we’d done 182 episodes and three movies together. I said, ‘Is there anything we can do to help you?’ He was not interested in talking to us at all about how we rolled. Talk about a family, because we rolled as a family."
Frakes’s recollection set the tone for a blistering conversation released June 9, 2026 in which Brent Spiner and guest Ron Perlman joined him in blaming the film’s director for much of its collapse. Perlman put it bluntly: he said Baird "had no people skills whatsoever" and called him, more colorfully, "He was not a director, he was a f—ing editor that the studio owed a favor to."
The cast’s criticism landed hard because Nemesis was not a small misstep. Released in 2003 as the fourth feature film and the final big-screen voyage for the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew, the picture is widely remembered as a box-office and critical failure — Paramount deemed Star Trek: Nemesis a bomb, and critics and fans panned the film. Six years later the franchise moved on with a reboot that replaced the Next Generation cast with a new crew.
Weight to the argument came from the mix of experience and affection on the recording. Spiner agreed with Perlman that Baird "was not a director," even as he praised the man’s earlier work as an editor. The group repeatedly acknowledged that Baird is a seasoned cutter — his résumé includes editing credits on Superman and Lethal Weapon and later high-profile films such as Casino Royale and Skyfall — and that studios called on him to fix troubled pictures. But the point the actors kept returning to was that editing talent did not translate into leadership on set.
That dissonance surfaced in specific memories. Frakes said Baird left him and Perlman hanging for an extended period of time while they filmed a dangerous stunt on a catwalk. Perlman recalled whispering, "We’re too old to be action heroes," and later described the younger cast members’ treatment as poor. He singled out Tom Hardy — called the film his breakout role — as an example of someone who deserved better: "he was so sweet, and so deferential," Perlman said. Spiner added that Hardy was "not treated well."
The conversation threaded a familiar through-line: Nemesis’s problems were not simply plot or budgetary. The cast portrayed themselves as a tightly knit ensemble forged over "182 episodes and three movies," and they describe a director who neither sought their collaborative experience nor managed the set in a way that kept the team intact. Perlman went further, saying Baird "saved a lot of Paramount’s turkeys" by recutting films, "So he was a very talented editor, but he was not a director… He’s not a filmmaker. [It’s] that attitude, like, ‘anybody can do this, you know, let’s just give it to that guy.'"
Those judgments reopen an old wound about a film long counted among the franchise’s failures. The cast’s public airing of grievances on a widely heard episode gives weight to a complaint fans and some crew members have parked around Nemesis for years: that the picture never found a coherent director’s voice and that the established chemistry of the Next Generation actors was sidelined.
The podcast also revisits Tom Hardy’s early career in an unguarded way — not a star-worshipping anecdote, but a cast’s testimony that a rising actor was treated with deference by colleagues and, they contend, not with the same care by the director. That detail narrows the debate from general blame to concrete examples of how Baird ran the set.
The cast’s comments were made public on June 9, 2026. The podcast transcript and the remarks stand as the newest public critique of Nemesis and of Stuart Baird’s stewardship. The episode does not say whether Stuart Baird, Tom Hardy, or Paramount issued a response, leaving the most immediate question — how Baird or the studio will answer these charges — unresolved.
