Tom Hardy auditioned for the role of Shinzon after Patrick Stewart asked Hardy's agent if any of his clients might be suitable; Hardy was filming in Morocco at the time and used a different, partly nude scene from a full script he obtained instead of the requested audition text.

Hardy's in-person screen test with Stewart went badly by his own account, but a tape he had recorded of himself performing the same piece in a hotel room the night before impressed director Stuart Baird, leading to his casting as Shinzon days later.

Baird and producer Rick Berman searched for an actor resembling a younger Patrick Stewart, at one point considering Jude Law, before Baird insisted on casting an unknown actor for the role of Shinzon.

Writer John Logan, producer Rick Berman, and actor Brent Spiner spent nearly two years developing the film's concept, choosing the Romulans as antagonists over the Klingons and inventing the Remans based on Logan's theory that the second planet on the Romulan crest referred to an unseen species.

Patrick Stewart objected to an early story idea in which Shinzon would be revealed as Picard's lost son rather than his clone, feeling that concept had already been explored and offered less interesting emotional dynamics.

The producers considered bringing back Spock or the character Sela for the story but dropped both ideas, worried they would distract from the plot or confuse casual viewers.

Director Stuart Baird had no particular background in Star Trek and, despite Jonathan Frakes being in the cast and having directed the two previous Star Trek films, chose not to consult him on directing decisions.

The first assembled cut of the film ran 160 minutes and was heavily trimmed to under two hours, cutting scenes such as Crusher's departure for a new medical posting, La Forge dating Leah Brahms, and Wesley Crusher's appearance at the wedding.

Makeup artist Michael Westmore's team created latex prosthetics molded from Patrick Stewart's face to make Tom Hardy resemble him, including multiple nose and chin pieces and a fake scar added to visually reduce the size of Hardy's lips.

Effects house Digital Domain contributed over 30 minutes of footage across roughly 400 shots, working with only five months for the bulk of the effects since much of the sequence work didn't arrive until May 2002; about 15% of the workload was outsourced to other studios.

The initial digital model of the Scimitar starship exceeded two million polygons and took two hours to render a single frame, prompting artists to reduce it to about 1.5 million polygons for practicality.

For the climactic collision, a practical 17-foot model of the Enterprise's saucer section was built and physically crashed into a model of the Scimitar, rather than relying entirely on CGI.

Composer Jerry Goldsmith, who had scored multiple prior Star Trek films and worked with Baird on his two previous films, wrote the Nemesis score as one of his final works before his death in 2004, opening and closing it with his theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture and weaving in a brief excerpt of Irving Berlin's 'Blue Skies'.

Nemesis was the first Star Trek film not to debut as the number-one movie at the US box office, opening in second place about $200,000 behind Maid in Manhattan, and it went on to earn the franchise's lowest domestic gross at the time.

Cast members LeVar Burton and Marina Sirtis later criticized director Stuart Baird for not having watched any episodes of The Next Generation, and Jonathan Frakes said he would have given the regular cast more screen time and made the villain less central had he directed it.

Jonathan Frakes missed the film's Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre because he was away directing the film Thunderbirds.