It all came as a surprise when Patrick Stewart announced last year that he would be reprising his role as the beloved Captain Jean-Luc Picard, a role he began playing three decades ago in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The last time Star Trek fans saw the noble captain was in the 2002 feature film Star Trek: Nemesis, and that seemed like it would be the last time. J.J. Abrams rebooted the Star Trek franchise with his 2009 feature film and launched a whole different timeline.

But this is the era of reboots and revivals after all, so why not bring back everyone’s favorite Starfleet captain? But it would take more than nostalgia (or a big paycheck) to tempt back an accomplished thespian like Stewart. So how did Star Trek: Picard series creator Alex Kurtzman do it? Well, it was a little superhero movie that Stewart was starring in at the time that convinced him, actually: Logan.

In a lengthy interview with Variety, Stewart revealed that he had no interest in returning to the character of Jean-Luc Picard after he had found himself typecast following The Next Generation. Stewart wanted to go back to the theater, to smaller projects, and he was already juggling another franchise on his hands with the X-Men series. But it was his last X-Men outing, the 2017 James Mangold pseudo-Western Logan, that made him reconsider.