Entertainment
Tom Hanks Nearly Changed the Best Star Trek Movie Ever Made
In its 60-year history, the Star Trek franchise has made numerous attempts to widen its fanbase beyond devoted Trekkies. Whether through the comedic, time-travel premise of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home or J.J. Abrams’s action-packed 2009 reboot, the creative team consistently tried to appeal to casual audiences by capitalizing on pop-culture trends. In 1996, the franchise nearly landed one of America’s most treasured actors for Star Trek: First Contact — Tom Hanks.
Paramount often tried to attract A-list talent to bring additional box office muscle to Gene Roddenberry’s beloved sci-fi franchise. Longtime Trek fan Eddie Murphy was once considered for a hip San Francisco professor role in The Voyage Home, and Sean Connery was the studio’s top choice to play the villainous Sybok in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. But Hanks, who is also a self-professed Trekkie, wasn’t being eyed for just any new role. Instead, the two-time Oscar winner was shortlisted for Star Trek’s most historic figure outside the Enterprise crew: Zefram Cochrane.
Who Is Zefram Cochrane in the Star Trek Universe?
In Star Trek: The Original Series, Cochrane was introduced as the creator of the warp drive system. Played by Glenn Corbett in the Season 2 episode “Metamorphosis,” Cochrane encounters Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the Enterprise crew on a planet where he had crash-landed years earlier, and an alien entity called “the Companion” had restored his youth. The entity goes on to attack the Enterprise crew, and Cochrane must work with them before they become stranded there permanently.
Cochrane returned in Star Trek: First Contact, whose time-travel plot involves the Borg attempting to assimilate Earth through a temporal vortex. To stop them, the Enterprise crew, led by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), follows the Borg back to 2063, where they encounter the legendary warp drive inventor just one day before his historic first flight. However, the Cochrane they meet is far from a heroic icon. He’s an alcoholic inventor who uses his ship in get-rich-quick schemes.
At the time of First Contact’s pre-production, Hanks was at a career peak. After spending much of the ’80s playing comedic everymen in hits like Splash and Big, he transitioned into prestige drama in the ’90s with Oscar-winning performances in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. Add to that his acclaimed 1995 performance as Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, along with voicing Woody in Toy Story, and the world was Hanks’s oyster. His addition could have conferred a new level of prestige and event status that none of the previous installments had achieved. But how close did he come to playing Cochrane?
In 2021, First Contact co-writer Ronald D. Moore addressed the subject during a retrospective interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Though Hanks’s name was floated early on, Moore revealed that talks “never got that far.” The role ultimately went to James Cromwell, who already had franchise experience from playing multiple characters on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
While Hanks’s popularity, high salary, and busy schedule — including directing and starring in That Thing You Do! — likely prevented his involvement, there remained a slim chance he might have participated. When Hanks appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2023, he enthusiastically reflected on the opportunity and his Trek fandom.
“The guy who invented warp drive? Oh come on, I would’ve jumped on that! I would have come in, and I would have brought gift Tribbles to everybody at the first meeting. ‘Guys, here’s some Tribbles for you.’”
Is There Room for Tom Hanks in the Star Trek Universe?
Despite Hanks’s affection for the franchise, things ultimately worked out for both him and the film. Having already portrayed a string of inspirational and heroic figures, Cochrane might have felt redundant at that stage of his career. Cromwell instead played the iconic fallen hero as a reluctant, slightly cynical celebrity — someone largely indifferent to humanity’s future until the Enterprise crew forces him to confront it. Hanks’s participation likely would have required extensive rewrites to expand Cochrane’s arc in an already crowded narrative. That could have distracted from the ensemble balance that made the film work.
In the end, Star Trek: First Contact succeeded with critics and general audiences without Hanks’s involvement. In later years, the franchise would attract acclaimed actors such as Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Idris Elba, and Paul Giamatti. As Star Trek continues to expand on the small screen with Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and a new feature film in development, the door remains open for Hanks to bring his gravitas to a new but significant character in the broader Star Trek universe.
Star Trek: First Contact is streaming on Paramount+ in the U.S.