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Patrick Stewart on saying goodbye to Star Trek: "It changed my life"

By Analisa Novak

February 16, 2023 / 11:39 AM EST / CBS News

It was more than three decades ago when actor Patrick Stewart first took the reign of the USS Enterprise and helped shoot the character of Captain Jean-Luc Picard into transcendental fame. 

Stewart had already found success acting in some English theater plays prior to entering the Star Trek franchise. He said that when he was first offered the role for the revival of the series, he thought that it wouldn't last a season. But taking the role would send him on his own star-filled journey. 

"It changed my life. There was nothing in my life that was not affected," Stewart said. 

He entered the franchise as Patrick Stewart but by the end of season two, he said he didn't know where Stewart began and Picard ended as the two identities became lockstepped with each other. 

As the series took off, Stewart attended a science fiction convention where he got a standing ovation from thousands of fans of the Star Trek franchise. 

He said that it was at this moment that he realized the impact that the American series had on "Trekkies" across the world as the franchise embodied diversity and equality within its roles and introduced topics that were at the time unfamiliar to new audiences.

"I saw the impact that Star Trek could have on people and their lives, the diversity of the show, its belief in honesty, fair play, equality, all those elements which kind of get a little sketchy these days," he said.  

Stewart left the show in 1994 but would return for brief roles in the different franchise movies that were released in the years after. 

He continued to make a name for himself in Hollywood, gaining further fame when he portrayed Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men series. 

But it wasn't long until he would return to the Starfleet in 2020 for the spinoff series: "Star Trek: Picard" on Paramount+. The series follows Picard into new chapters of his life.  

The show is now entering its third and final season and like Picard, Stewart is looking forward to new adventures by returning to familiar territory.   

"There is a movie, and that's possible in the future. But principally, I think the moment has come when I'm going to return to the live theatre, to the stage. In fact, there are a couple of Shakespeare roles I've never played," he said.

Analisa Novak is a content producer for CBS News and the Emmy-award-winning "CBS Mornings." Based in Chicago, she specializes in covering live events and exclusive interviews for the show. Beyond her media work, Analisa is a United States Army veteran and holds a master's degree in strategic communication from Quinnipiac University.

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For Patrick Stewart, Jean-Luc Picard is ‘the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me’

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As the august space voyager Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart commanded the Starship Enterprise on and off across seven seasons of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” four feature films, and, after a two-decade pause, three seasons of “Picard.” It’s a role he took only because he was assured by confidants that “The Next Generation,” which required a six-year contract, wouldn’t run a year, freeing him to return to England and the theater.

The final season of “ Picard ,” which concludes Thursday on Paramount+ , brings down the curtain on the character and, in bringing back most of the original show’s cast, “The Next Generation” saga as well. I spoke with Stewart, 82, a genial, funny, casually dapper gent, at the home he shares with his wife, singer Sunny Ozell — an old Spanish-style house on a leafy Los Angeles street, purchased just before the pandemic. (“I never thought I’d live in a house that had archways everywhere — no doors!” He counted six from where we were sitting.) Stewart had watched the finale that morning, and he had thoughts and more.

Did you fall in love with Shakespeare before you decided to become an actor?

No. Because “fall in love” doesn’t fit my experience. But something happened, and it happened the first time I held a copy of Shakespeare in my hand and read aloud. And that was because of an English teacher, Cecil Dormand; he had that wonderful ability of being intense and serious about the work and also entertaining and comical at times.

And one day he went around our classroom, dropping a little thin book onto [our desks] and said, “Right, ‘Merchant of Venice.’ This is William Shakespeare, and you’re reading so and so,” and finally, “Patrick, you’re reading Shylock. OK, Act 4, Scene 1 — you know, who you’re playing, start reading it.” So we all went [mimes students reading silently], and he said, “Not to yourselves, you idiots. This is life, it’s drama. It’s the real world. Aloud!” And I had a big speech — it’s the trial scene — I didn’t know what the hell I was saying. There were words I’d never encountered before. I didn’t understand it, but there was something that made my breathing deeper. I can only remember the physical sensation because I was 12 — it wasn’t comprehension, I just felt weight in myself, which I hadn’t felt before. And I was hooked.

Tell me about Murph Swander.

Murph Swander ! His real name was Homer. Homer D. Swander. In one sense, he’s why this huge event happened in my career and life. Murph came knocking on my dressing room at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in Stratford-on-Avon. He was standing there with a bottle of malt whiskey in his hand, and he introduced himself and said, “I’m here with a group of young people from California and we’re coming to see your show tonight and we’d love you to come talk to us tomorrow.” I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t do that. My work is what I do onstage, not talking about it.” And he said, “Well, it would give the students a lot of pleasure if you came, and by the way, this is for you.” I couldn’t afford to drink single malt whiskey in those days, so I said, “All right. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” And I talked for the whole hour without taking a breath.

Jumping forward many years, he set up a sort of institution which was run by Murph and myself and another actor, may he rest in peace, called Tony Church, and we went to Santa Barbara [where Swander taught] and did a week of classes, and we’d go to UCLA and up to Santa Cruz — it was mostly the University of California circuit. I got to know some of the teachers very well. And one of them, professor David Rodes, a specialist in Shakespeare at UCLA, called me one day and said, “I’m giving a public lecture on campus, and if you wouldn’t mind reading some passages to illustrate it, I thought it would be great.” So I said, “Sure, of course.” And he said, “There’s $100 in it for you.” “Wow, yes, I’ll do that.”

So I did, and the next morning, I got a call from a man who told me he was my agent — I’d never met him, never talked to him before, but he was my agent in California — and he said, “I’ve got two questions for you. What the hell were you doing at UCLA last night and why would Gene Roddenberry want to see you this morning?” And I said, “Jean who? I don’t know her.” And he told me who Gene Roddenberry was.

What were your first impressions of him?

Impressions ... not good. What I learned many months later was that one of the producers of this new series, which I’d never heard of —

You’d never heard of “Star Trek” at all?

I may have heard of it. When my children were young, I used to race home from the theater in Stratford after the matinee so I could help with their supper and read them a story before racing back to do an evening performance. And they’d watch this show, which I used to occasionally see when I came home on Saturday afternoon, these guys wearing different color T-shirts. That’s all I knew.

So I was told that it was a new “Star Trek” series , and I went to Gene Roddenberry’s house and was greeted at the door by this man, Robert Justman, who had been at the university the previous night and had called Gene Roddenberry and said, “I think we found an actor we’ve got to have in the show.” When I arrived, there were two other men there, besides Gene and Robert, and nobody asked me sit down. We talked for about 10 minutes standing up, and then Gene said, “Thanks for coming over,” and goodbye. And I was back on the street, and I thought, “Bloody hell, what the heck was that about?”

Yes, Hollywood. So I called my agent and told him and he said, “Well, it’s funny you should say that because we’ve had another call and they want to see you again. “

Were there things that attracted you to the show, other than that it was work?

Nnnnnope . It was a style of work I never associated with, or even particularly watched when I was younger. Sci-fi didn’t have any interest for me. What was of interest was that it was on camera, it was in California, it was in Hollywood. My agent took me out to lunch and said, “I’ve got to walk you through the deal.” And when he told me some of the details I was totally disbelieving, what my salary per episode would be — incomprehensible. I couldn’t imagine that, nor indeed had I ever wanted it. I just loved the work I was doing, [playing] Shakespeare and other great dramatists.

Was there a point where it became emotionally satisfying, more than just a job?

It took a long time. I worked very, very hard. I wanted to do good work because I thought this might be my passport to Hollywood. Well, seven years later, we wrapped the series and then we did four movies. It was the biggest thing that’s ever happened to me.

More for better than for worse.

Unquestionably.

How different was it playing Picard in “Picard” ?

Oh, so different. I turned it down at first. And then I thought about the offer and decided I would do it, but I made two conditions. I didn’t want to wear a uniform, and it must not be a series that is fundamentally a sentimental reunion of “The Next Generation.” And they agreed to that. And I think the first “Next Generation” character who came on the show was Jonathan Frakes [as Will Riker] and then in Season 2, Marina Sirtis, who played Counselor Troi, was also in it. And to my great pleasure, I enjoyed having them back on the soundstage. We’ve all aged, all of us. I mean, Michael Dorn [who plays Worf], whose hair is white! And Jonathan with his grizzled gray beard. And me, of course, with my hollowed cheeks and exhausted appearance.

I think it was [producer] Alex Kurtzman who said, “Look, 20 years have passed, and in those 20 years, surely a lot has happened to you, Patrick. I know enough about your life to know there have been upheavals and changes. Surely, the same has happened to Jean-Luc Picard. What might those things be?” Well, I actually invented a whole story about those missing years; this may sound a little pretentious, but to create that past, which I assume will never, ever be known, was very intimate, and it influenced me when we began shooting “Picard.” Because I knew he had needs, longings, desires that were not being fulfilled. Disappointment that things had not gone the way he had hoped. Loneliness. Separation from these people he had loved and admired.

There are moments when I look at scenes in “Picard” and think, “Poor guy, [laughing] he looks terrible. He’s having such a bad time.” That wasn’t my intention, but that was what was being communicated. Anxiety, stress, irritation. I never yelled as Picard — I mean, I may have done — “ The line must be drawn here! ” [pronounced “hee-yah,” much-memed dialogue from the film “ Star Trek: First Contact ”], for which I was made fun of for decades. Actually, there was one like it in the last episode, and I thought, “At least, because there aren’t any more episodes, nobody will be making fun of me.” We made fun of one another a lot.

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Were there any kinds of scenes you particularly enjoyed or didn’t enjoy playing?

I have to admit that when we got into Season 5, 6 and 7 [of “The Next Generation”], there were days I wished I could be doing something different — when you do 178 episodes there’s bound to be repetition. And there were some things about “Picard” I was uncomfortable with, when I thought it was nudging its way toward being a reunion show. But there were not many. And the way the show has been directed, and lit, and staged, it’s so impressive. So many times I feel I’m watching a movie and not a TV series.

I looked forward to those scenes where Picard was not just anxious but actually frightened. Or confused. Or not knowing what to do. I got great satisfaction out of playing those things, because they allowed me to investigate, and release, aspects of Jean-Luc that had really never appeared in “Next Generation.”

What do you think you brought to the character that wasn’t necessarily on the page?

Well, I very quickly came to understand that “ Star Trek ” was not naturalistic television. And there was a sort of formality about being the captain. I was the captain of a starship, and I sat in the center seat, and I had assistants on either side of me and people running the ship down there in front, and it very much reminded me of numerous Shakespearean situations I’d been in onstage. And I thought, “That’s how I should regard this role, as if it were ‘Henry IV,’” which is about brave men. And very quickly I got to know the cast.

Does that family of actors reflect on the family of characters?

I think so, yes. Your use of the word family is in fact very accurate. That is what we became. If you add Whoopi Goldberg, who joined us in the second season, and John de Lancie, who came in as Q. We became so close, and that’s grown over the years.

Last night, I watched Episode 9of Season 3, and this morning, I watched the final episode. There had been a little conflict about how it should end, and the script we held when we started shooting had an ending I was thrilled by — I thought it was absolutely perfect — I can’t tell you what it was — and then when we were shooting, a problem occurred. It was the last day and, oh, it was getting so late and we had so much to do. And I said, “We can pick that up anytime, it’s only me involved.” We never did it. So the ending I loved was never filmed. Instead, it was one I wasn’t happy about — until this morning.

Until you saw it.

The impact that the final episode had on me was unexpected and almost overwhelming. When it finally finished, I had to call out for my wife and go give her a hug because I felt so deeply connected with what I’d watched.

The way the series ends is wonderful. And I so badly thought it was totally wrong when we shot it. But the director and producers, in particular Terry Matalas, who directed it, his instinct was absolutely right, and my instinct was only protective, whereas he was going deeper into what made me feel this morning the whole effect it had on my life and career, this show. And I promise you, if you’d come to see me at half past 8 this morning, you would have found me in my wife’s arms, wiping away the tears.

It has the necessary elements: a bar, Shakespeare and poker.

But it has something else, doesn’t it? It has feelings.

‘Star Trek: Picard’

Where: Paramount+ When: Any time Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under age 14)

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Star Trek: Picard

Follow-up series to Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) that centers on Jean-Luc Picard in the next chapter of his life. Follow-up series to Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) that centers on Jean-Luc Picard in the next chapter of his life. Follow-up series to Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) that centers on Jean-Luc Picard in the next chapter of his life.

• Kirsten Beyer
• Michael Chabon
• Akiva Goldsman
• Patrick Stewart
• Michelle Hurd
• 2.8K User reviews
• 78 Critic reviews
• 14 wins & 54 nominations total

Episodes 30

• Jean-Luc Picard

• Raffi Musiker

• Seven of Nine

• Dr. Agnes Jurati

• Cristóbal Rios …

• Adam Soong …

• La Sirena Computer

• Jack Crusher

• Doctor Beverly Crusher

• Captain Liam Shaw

• Ensign Sidney La Forge

• Ensign Esmar

• Titan Computer …
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia The Chateau Picard vineyard first appeared in Family (1990) . It was run by Jean-Luc Picard's brother Robert and his wife Marie, and their son René. Jean-Luc would learn in Star Trek: Generations (1994) that Robert and René had both burned to death in a fire, leaving Jean-Luc as the last in the Picard line.
• Goofs Commodore Oh often wears sunglasses. Star Trek lore establishes that Vulcans have an inner eyelid to protect against harsh sunlight on their desert planet. Oh's shades are a fashion statement, not a protective measure.
• The first season features a Borg cube and the planet Romulus.
• The second season features a Borg ship, a wormhole and hourglass, and the Borg Queen's silhouette.
• The third season does not have an opening titles sequence.
• Connections Featured in Half in the Bag: Comic Con 2019, The Picard Trailer, Streaming Services, and Midsommar (2019)

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• January 23, 2020 (United States)
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• The Sunstone Villa and Vineyard, Santa Ynes, California, USA (Château Picard)
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• Runtime 46 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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The Last Word: Patrick Stewart on Picard’s Evolution, Going Bald, Helping Veterans

By Sean Woods

Sir Patrick Stewart ’s return to the Star Trek universe and the role of the captain that made him famous in Picard has been greeted with widespread critical acclaim and unbridled nerd enthusiasm. Rolling Stone’ s Alan Sepinwall hailed the show and rightly called Stewart  “far and away the best actor to be a  Star Trek  regular.” When Rolling Stone caught up with Stewart, he was behaving as you might expect of a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company: practicing lines for a return to the stage and “sitting in my house in the country in Oxfordshire, with a nice big fire going because it’s overcast and cold.”

“I’m grateful to have somewhere like this to hide away,” he adds. “It is  pretty British.”

During our Last Word interview with Stewart, we asked the actor to look back on his career, to share some life advice and reflect on why he was willing to take on a character he’d seemed to have left behind long ago. “The fact is, 18 years have passed since I last put on Captain Picard’s uniform,” he told Rolling Stone. “And the world we’re living in is a different place.”

What was the best advice you ever received? In terms of the work that I do, Duncan Ross, a brilliant, brilliant acting teacher, gave me quite a stern talking to. He said, “Patrick, the most important thing you have to understand is that you will never achieve success by ensuring against failure.” I thought I understood what he meant, I thought I got it: “Yes, yes, you’ve got to take risks. You’ve got to be brave, you’ve got to gamble.” It was more than 30 years of being an actor before I really internally understood what he meant. Now, it’s become a habit of mine, before I make an entrance onstage every night, to say out loud but quietly, “I don’t give a fuck!” And I go work. And it works! It takes away anxiety and stress and worry, and all of those stupid wasteful things that don’t help you at all.

Were you hesitant to go back to your Star Trek character, Picard? Hesitant? I turned it down. It was history. It was behind me and there was nothing more to be said about Jean Luc Picard or his life. When I met the producers I was 77. I’m 79 now, and there is a ticking clock, and there’s still a lot I want to do, but I had a lot of needs and longings than more Star Trek. But I have to admit, the script more than caught my attention. It was not returning to the world that I had been in before.

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How so? The fact is, 18 years have passed since I last put on Captain Picard’s uniform. And the world we’re living in is a different place. I’ve just been listening to the 5 o’clock news here [in England] and what’s happening with Brexit. Of course, both our countries are in the same kind of predicament in that we have a totally unsuitable person running the country. I use, as an example, the film Logan . No longer was Charles Xavier the sensitive, compassionate intellectual sitting in his wheelchair. He was a totally broken person. When I thought about if I was to consider Star Trek, I used Logan as an illustration — we continued the fundamental themes of the X-Men movies, and the principle characters were still there, but they were in a different world. Their lives had changed, there had been dramas and horror and tragedies, and things were now grim and perilous .

What was growing up in post-war England like? Oh, Lord, I was talking about this the other day. I was born in 1940, and my father was already away at the war. He was part of the British Expeditionary Force that attacked France at the end of 1939, and it was a disaster. The German panzer divisions just massacred them. My father was not a great one for telling wartime anecdotes. But he did tell me about one evening: He was with a whole group of men who were trying to get back to the coast and save themselves, when they heard Winston Churchill on the radio announce that “today we have removed the last members of the British Expeditionary Force from the battlefields in France.” Well, Winston, you got it wrong, because there were certainly many hundred still there. My father was one of them. He got on the last boat out. So, this had a profound effect on him. He suffered seriously from PTSD. This was to affect him for the rest of his life. The only treatment that you got in those days was somebody would yell at you, if you were in the army, to pull yourself together and act like a man. So when he came home, he was not a happy man. He was discontented, restless, frustrated, and unwell. But that was not recognized at the time, and it made many aspects of my own life unpleasant.

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And he was abusive to you and your mother? He was, yes. He was a weekend alcoholic, which meant that from 10 o’clock on Friday evening, for the next 48 hours you had to be very careful what you did and said. But he would be drunk and he would be violent, and that continued for a number of years. It gradually lessened, partly because he realized that my brother and I were getting bigger. The sad thing for me is, I didn’t know that he was suffering and needed therapy and all of those things that so many returning veterans need today. For years, I’d given my father a very bad press, but I became a patron of a wonderful organization called Refuge, which is an organization dedicated to providing a safe house for women and their children who had violent husbands. But then, about five years ago, I learned about my father and his PTSD. I felt ashamed that I had used his name as a symbol for violence and anger, not knowing that he couldn’t help himself. I don’t defend him for the violence. Violence is never an option. Recently, I was invited to become an active member of a group called Combat Stress , and they focus on helping veterans with PTSD. So, I now try to balance things out, doing my Refuge work for my mother and Combat Stress for my father. I could do nothing for them when I was little, when I was young. Nothing. I would put my body between my father and my mother as I got bigger, and try to defy him, but it didn’t often work. In their names, now I’m able to, with the time that I have available, do more for them.

You were almost a journalist at some point, and then you chose acting over journalism. I was a cub reporter. Strings were pulled. I had a very, very modest education. We left school at 15 in those days, and my local newspaper took me on. I was given a district of my own to cover, which I really enjoyed. I threw myself into the job, aware that I was very, very lucky to have a job like that. But I’d become massively involved with amateur theatricals. I loved it. I loved going to rehearsals. For one thing, it got me out of my house. But, there was a problem, which was that all my amateur acting interfered badly with my work as a journalist. I got into trouble. I was dishonest. I made things up. I invented stuff. Yes, yes, yes … Because to me, being at the rehearsal was more important than attending a council meeting. Finally, I was found out, when the huge mill in my town caught fire one evening, and someone called the newspaper and the editor said, “No, don’t worry, Patrick’s right next door.” Well, I wasn’t there. I was in the rehearsal room. I was found out and got hauled before the editor, who gave me an ultimatum: “Give up all this amateur acting, this ridiculous playing games that you’re doing, and concentrate on doing your job, for which we’re paying properly.” I didn’t like being talked to like that, so I went upstairs and I packed up my typewriter and I left. I went home and said, “I’m going to be an actor.” And they said, “How are you going to do that?” And I said, “I’ve no idea. I’m going to find out.” And I did.

How did you cope with going bald so young? Was it hard? Yes, it was. I got very depressed about it because my hair fell out very quickly. I was 19. By the time I was 20, it was gone. I spent a lot of money — more than I could afford — on a really great hairpiece, a wig. And I would wear it to auditions. And usually what they asked for in the theater in those days were two audition pieces, which you could choose yourself. So I would do one as a character piece, wearing my hairpiece. And then I would very quickly take it off and do a totally different character, looking like a different actor. And I would say to them, “Hey, two actors for the price of one. You can’t turn this down, can you?” The worst part about it was I thought it meant my romantic life was over, would never happen, because what woman would like to go out with a bald 19-year-old? Very few. Whereas these days, nowadays, men with these fabulous heads of hair shave it. That’s fine, but I thought, “That’s it. Romance is dead for me, so just throw yourself into your work, Patrick. Make the best of it.”

You became famous later in life. What do you think it would have done to you if you’d been famous as a younger person? I think I might have been a nightmare. The thing is, I got a chance to observe, because I worked for 15 months with Vivien Leigh, for example. We toured the world in three productions with her playing the leading role. I got to watch Vivien and many other brilliant leading actors. I used them as my benchmark. All of these people were beautifully behaved. I was madly in love with Vivien Leigh. She was always so kind to me, although I was actually the least important member of the company. I saw how you have a choice about how you behave and what kind of work you can do. And I used that information to try to do the best possible work I could.

You revived your one-man Christmas Carol show in New York this holiday season. The whole story is really a man looking back on his life. I wonder how you look back, and what that story taught you? I am loving working on it again because it’s 16 or 17 years since I last performed this. I’m not the person I was when I created this role over 20 years ago, and I’m seeing the story very differently. And, of course, because what has happened in our world, I’m seeing it much more as a political document than as a lovely, sweet, adorable Christmas story. It’s full of bitter, savage attacks on the inequalities of life, particularly in London. Dickens was very sensitive to this and wrote brilliantly about it: When Jacob Marley comes to visit Scrooge that first night, and Marley is telling him how he ruined his life by being only obsessed with money, and Scrooge says to him, “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob.” And Marley says, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.” I never made quite enough of that before, because that’s what it’s about. It’s not just about being rich or poor, but it’s about, if you have resources, what do you do with them? This is about you making them available to people who have less, and you do all that you can to care for them. That’s not a spirit that’s abroad much in our world today, is it?

You are involved with the campaign for death with dignity and assisted suicide. What brought it to you and why is it important to you? I’d always been intrigued about what they call doctor-assisted dying. When I was in my sixties, a friend of mine told me an appalling story. I knew that his wife had died. I didn’t know how. She was seriously ill with cancer, incurable cancer, and in extraordinary pain. He told me how he was living alone with his wife, looking after her, and one night he went out to walk the dog. So while he was gone, she put a plastic bag around her head and knotted it under her chin, and was dead when he got back. This story shocked me so profoundly that I decided to investigate more. I came across Dignity in Dying , and they’re a fantastic organization who campaign for a change in British law that would permit doctor-assisted dying, but only with the strictest, most severe conditions attached to this — because people are concerned about families wanting to get rid of some old person or somebody who has money and they want to inherit it, all that kind of thing. What we argue for is signed documents from two doctors that this person is terminally ill, will die within six months, and is of sound mind to make this decision themselves, and is under no pressure. If someone is in profound misery, and is a person of faith, the way in which I believe their faith can be celebrated is by giving them what they most need: a pain-free ending. It will give other people a choice to end their life in the way in which they wish to see it end. Of course, I put myself in their shoes, often. I’m 79, and I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

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Published Oct 4, 2010

Sir Patrick Stewart Interview

Patrick Stewart once feared that Star Trek – and his iconic status as Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation – would prove to be an “albatross” around his neck. It didn’t turn out that way, of course. Post- Star Trek , Stewart has engaged in a remarkably expansive array of work that includes starring roles on Broadway and the West End and in films and televisions programs. His voice – that sonorous, authoritative voice – has been heard in everything from documentaries and commercials to videogames and animated shows/features. Some credits include: the blockbuster X-Men features, The Lion in Winter, Antony and Cleopatra, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, Macbeth, Eleventh Hour, Hamlet, American Dad! and Waiting for Godot.

And today, Stewart’s good fortune continues. He was knighted on June, 2, 2010, by Queen Elizabeth II, turned 70 years old on July 13, and has a slew of projects on the way, among them a new Broadway play ( A Life in the Theatre ), a PBS movie ( Macbeth ), a videogame ( Castlevania: Lords of Shadow ) and several features ( Gnomeo & Juliet, Sinbad: The Fifth Voyage and Dorothy of Oz ). StarTrek.com recently caught up with Stewart for an exclusive, extensive and revelatory conversation. Part one can be found below, and look for part two tomorrow.

The Next Generation debuted 23 years ago last week. How true is the story that you thought Next Gen would provide you with a few months work and income, and an opportunity to get a nice tan, and that you’d then head back home to England?

Stewart: Well, that is what I was advised when I was offered the role, which was on a Monday, lunchtime, and told that I had until Friday lunchtime to make a decision. I was shocked because I’d never for a moment believed that I would get cast in Star Trek. I’d been called back to Los Angeles three times from the UK for auditions. So I raced around L.A., talking to anybody I knew I had any connection with, who was in the television and film industry, asking their advice. “What should I do?” I was to discover I had to sign a six-year contract. I was very naïve about the conditions attached to series television in the U.S.A. Every single person I spoke to – agents, directors, screenwriters, other actors – said, “Oh, don’t worry about six years. You’ll be lucky to make it through the first year.” Everybody felt it was madness to try to revive an iconic series like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek . So, on the basis of that advice I signed the six-year contract.

Looking back at your entire run, from the show to the features, who was Jean-Luc Picard supposed to be and who was he by the end? Also, what influence would you say you had on the character's evolution through your performances and as a result of conversations you had with (executive producer) Rick Berman and the writers over the years?

Stewart: I had dinner with Gene Roddenberry at the Bel Air Country Club the weekend before we began rehearsal for the pilot. I’d read the pilot episode, “Encounter at Farpoint,” by then and my reason for meeting with Gene was to take from him his counsel and his guidelines as to how I should develop this character. All Gene said to me was, “You know the Horatio Hornblower stories?” And I said, “I did, because I read them as a teenager and enjoyed them.” He said, “I am sending some copies around to you. Read them. That’s all you need to know.” (Laughs). Well, I did read one of the Horatio Hornblower stories and I think I got the idea of what Gene was after. In the pilot episode and throughout the first season I was following that path of a rather heroic, romantic leading officer who was on a voyage of discovery. Then, working with the writers, talking to the writers, different aspects of his character, the rather more complex and at times ambivalent aspects of his character began to emerge.

And when Gene died tragically early – and certainly tragically early in the life of Next Generation – there were some shifts after that. I had been working very closely with Rick Berman and I knew some of the things Rick was interested in, and he knew some of my passions: social issues, politics, sexual politics, and so forth. And we began to investigate those aspects of the character a little more than we had in the first couple of season. Rick was always very generous to me and took on board suggestions and discussed ideas, even down to details of dialogue. So my involvement grew and grew and grew so that by the time we got into the seventh season there was a total overlap between Jean-Luc Picard and Patrick Stewart. I no longer had to sit in my trailer getting into character. I knew this man intimately. He was very, very close to me. I don’t take credit for the creation of Jean-Luc Picard. That came from Gene and the writers at the very beginning of the production, and those who subsequently came to write for the character.

As it stands now, Nemesis is Picard’s swan song. How accepting are you of that? Or is there a part of you that wants one last crack at Picard to perhaps send him off a little more appropriately? Stewart: While we were filming Nemesis an idea was being developed by John Logan, the screenwriter of Nemesis , and Brent Spiner for a fifth and final movie. It was a very exciting idea for a screenplay. It would have been a real farewell to Next Generation , but it would have involved other historic aspects of Star Trek as well. I can’t go into details because the project wasn’t mine. When that didn’t happen, the studio announced in its own inimitable way that we were suffering from franchise fatigue and that there was to be no more, and I am absolutely content with that. I remain very proud of the work that we did, very proud of the series and the movies, but I do not wish to return to it.

Let’s talk about Macbeth. You starred in a West End version of it in 2007, then in a Brooklyn Academy of Music production in 2008, and now you, co-star Kate Fleetwood and director Rupert Goold have reunited for a PBS film adaptation that will premiere on October 6. Why was it important to you to have this production captured for posterity?

Stewart: Theater is a sort of transitory, ephemeral business and the best performances very often only live on in the memories of the people who saw them. But when something which was as successful as this Macbeth and had such an impact on stage, if there is a chance to preserve something of what was done it’s really satisfying. If you watch this PBS presentation you will see that it is much, much more than a recording of the stage production. It’s a film and it stands as a film in its own right. I am delighted with it and thrilled with the work that Rupert Goold has done.

What role in the Shakespeare canon is still on your actor’s bucket list?

Stewart: Well, of course, there are two that are absolute essentials. They are Falstaff in the Henry IV plays and, of course, Lear. Lear will have to wait a little bit, as we’ve had rather a surfeit of Lears in the UK in the last few years. But that’s no problem. The good thing about Lear is that the older you get, the more suitable you are for it, at least, as actors always point out, just so long as you can still carry Cordelia. And Falstaff is a role I must play at some point. I have always looked on Falstaff as the middle-aged actor’s Hamlet. It’s hugely complex and very diverse and, of course, very funny, too.

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Patrick Stewart: ‘I’d go straight home and drink until I passed out’

As he beams aboard another Star Trek adventure, the 81-year-old actor talks about playing Picard as an intergalactic Prospero, hitting the bottle during an exhausting Macbeth – and reaching page 310 of his memoir

P atrick Stewart is slightly surprised to be talking about the impending second series of Star Trek: Picard, during a break from shooting the third in California. The reason is that he so firmly turned down the first season. After playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard, 24th-century hero of Starfleet, in 176 TV episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and four spin-off movies, Stewart was convinced that “I’d done everything I could with Picard and Star Trek”.

But the producers – Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys), Kirsten Beyer (Star Trek: Discovery), Alex Kurtzman (The Mummy) – persisted. And Stewart “took a look at the names, and there were Academy award and Pulitzer prize winners. So I thought the most courteous thing to do would be to have a meeting to tell them face to face why I was going to turn them down.”

Over coffee, he explained his refusal: been there, done that, got the nylon polo neck tunics. But the petitioners asked if they could still make a pitch. They spoke for 20 minutes, Stewart recalls on Zoom from his Los Angeles home, after which he was intrigued enough to ask if they could send him something on paper. Reading those 36 pages “convinced me that there was enough new stuff to explore”.

Their clinching argument was that both the actor and his character had been in their 50s during The Next Generation, which ended in 1994; now they were octogenarian, with Picard retired from space and in exile, for reasons gradually clarified, at his family vineyard. The show would explore the intervening decades. “And when I looked at it like that,” says Stewart, “my attention was grabbed. Because they were doing the opposite of getting me to repeat what I’d done before. We would not be treading old ground just because that’s what a lot of people might like to see. It would be a new person with a different set of values and relationships.”

Did he watch old episodes or rely on his memories? “The latter. As the seven seasons of TNG went by, the distinction between Jean-Luc Picard and Patrick Stewart became thinner and thinner, until it was impossible for me to know where he left off and I began. So much of what I believed and felt went into that show. So coming back to the part, I felt that the impact of time on Jean-Luc would just be there in where I am now. And that’s how it has felt.”

Was the deal that if anyone played the older Picard, it would be Stewart – or was there a risk of switching on to find, say, his friend Ian McKellen in the part? “Oh, I would have watched that,” Stewart laughs. “What a clever idea. No. They were absolutely clear: if I passed on it, there would be no show. And I believed them and thought that was generous.”

As a classical stage actor – his focus before the Star Trek and the X-Men franchises gave his career a more lucrative second act – Stewart had twice played Prospero in The Tempest . Did the writers deliberately intend a parallel between the old, haunted astronaut of Star Trek: Picard and Shakespeare’s exiled Duke of Milan, brooding on a desert island? “Yes!” says Stewart. “That sense of the future lacking the significance it used to have. And a genuine fear that he doesn’t know how to handle things now.”

Filmed back-to-back due to confidence in the project, the second and third seasons “show much more of the romantic and emotional life of Picard, which there was very little of in the original series. There’s an increasing feeling that he missed out on an awful lot of living.”

But wasn’t Picard’s status as a sort of space-monk, ascetic and celibate, a deliberate contrast with predecessor William Shatner’s James Tiberius Kirk, who had a new date or old flame on every planet? “Yes, that’s true. That was a factor in The Next Generation. But by the time of the sequel, we felt able to explore whether Picard might be able to find a way of living alongside someone.”

McKellen – who achieved a similar late-career screen superstardom – has spoken of the shock experienced by actors who move from classical theatre to fantasy franchises, especially the intensity of the fans. Did Stewart also find the adjustment difficult? “It’s not that I found it difficult. I just initially refused to acknowledge it. Throughout the first season of The Next Generation, I was continually getting these invitations to attend something called ‘conventions’. And my reaction was no because that had nothing to do with what I was trying to achieve: I wanted the show to have an impact on screen, not me standing on a platform talking about it.

“But at the end of the season, I accepted one in Denver. They took me to the back of this big building and I said, ‘What if no one turns up?’ And they looked at me like I was talking gibberish. I walked out and there were more than 3,000 people in this vast auditorium. And it overwhelmed me – not just the enthusiasm for my being there but an intense sense of affection and respect. Which wasn’t something I’d always experienced in this profession. After that, I’d do three or four of these conventions in each season.”

The success of The Next Generation initially led Stewart to turn down the first X-Men movie in 2000. “I said, ‘Look, I know this isn’t science fiction but it’s fantasy, and I’ve done that.’ But they persuaded me that it wouldn’t be like Star Trek, so I did it. And yet again I was proved wrong. Both shows broadened my sense of what it was to be a professional actor. I’ve been an actor since I was 18 – and I’m now 81. I think the last 10 to 15 years have had more impact on me than anything before and left me more than ever compelled to do this job.”

That period included, in theatre, an acclaimed Macbeth, a Waiting for Godot in the West End and on Broadway, and then Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land . Both the Beckett and the Pinter were as a double act with McKellen, who was also in the first X-Men film. Did he talk the reluctant Stewart into signing up? “No. This is the odd thing. Although I always admired Ian – an actor of that quality and passion, how could you not? – we didn’t really know each other well then.”

At the RSC, they tended to be playing the lead in different shows. “It’s only in the last couple of decades that we’ve become like brothers. It was due to X-Men, in fact. I’ve always been quite a shy person. But we were shooting X-Men in Toronto and in adjoining trailers at the base camp. On that kind of technically complex film, you spend far more time sitting waiting to work than working. So we’d hang out together in his trailer or my trailer and it was the element that made me most grateful for X-Men: that it brought Ian into my life. Ian was already cast in Waiting for Godot as Estragon and was looking for a Vladimir, and he chose me. In both the Beckett and the Pinter, it helped that we are able to tune into each other very easily. Although actually, we are very different people. There are many differences and distinctions.”

Apart from McKellen having been a key gay rights campaigner and Stewart being married to a third wife, Sunny, the pair are also a theatrical War of the Roses: McKellen from Lancashire (Burnley), Stewart Yorkshire-born (Kirklees). The white-rose actor laughs: “Yes. Indeed. And there’s also what Ian calls my obsession with my poor education. He won a scholarship to go to Cambridge, and I left school at 15 and two days. I was at a secondary modern school, where a great English teacher first put Shakespeare into my hands and asked me to read it aloud. But I feel a sense of intimidation at Ian’s level of education. Although I now understand he spent most of his time at Cambridge acting rather than studying.”

Although both have played Prospero and Macbeth, Stewart’s move to the US in the 1980s means that two great Shakespearean roles graced by McKellen – Hamlet and King Lear – have eluded him. Stewart, though, points out that, as McKellen last year played Hamlet again at the age of 82 , the Prince of Denmark may yet come his way. “When I heard Ian was doing that Hamlet with non-conventional casting,” says Stewart, “I asked him if I could play Ophelia because it felt absolutely natural. But the timings didn’t work out.”

Stewart has been talking to a director about the possibility of a King Lear on stage, for which he is the traditional generation and gender, although this show might also include some unusual casting. When I suggest that McKellen could play Lear’s Fool, Stewart says: “My feeling is that Ian would want to play Cordelia. I’d love to have him as my daughter. I’m just worried that stamina would be an issue. I’m not sure I could do eight shows a week as Lear; it would have to be six maximum, which may not suit producers. So it may be too late. But I feel I’d have missed out on an experience if I never play Lear.”

It is the energy and intensity of theatre that both attract and alarm him. His acclaimed Macbeth from 2007 to 2008 “ended on Broadway exactly 365 days after the first preview in Chichester. It was all I did for a year. I had difficult patches and there was a period when we were in New York that performing that play took everything I had. I would end the show emotionally exhausted, go straight home and drink alcohol until I passed out. I’d sleep for a good many hours and then find that, by about four in the afternoon, there were little stirrings of, ‘You’re going to play this great role again in a few hours.’ And I’d know it would end with me being fucked in a few hours. But it was the only way I could find to do it. And I think that year opened up new possibilities for me. Everything has to count; it’s not just fun any more.” But surely he couldn’t carry on with the burn-out-black-out-repeat of that Macbeth year? “No. I know now that I have to stop and take a break.”

The British TV section of his CV is sparse: I, Claudius, Smiley’s People, Maybury between 1976 and 1983, after which his screen work is almost all American. Could or should he have done more in the UK? “Possibly. I don’t think of them as being separate. Tomorrow, I’ll be picked up at 4.30 and taken to a Hollywood studio where I’ll be in front of cameras, which is what I’ve been doing for much of the last 40 years. But it doesn’t feel different from filming in Britain, or theatre. When the medium changes, acting still stays the same for me – which is to make it truthful.”

The nature of truthful acting has recently become disputed, with pressure for “authentic” representation rather than imaginative transformation. Stewart’s X-Men character, Professor Charles Xavier, uses a wheelchair. Some actors and commenters would now argue that an able-bodied actor should no longer play that part. What is Stewart’s view? “I think the argument, while coming from a very good place, is a resistance to creativity in the work that we do. I respect and understand the feelings but I think we would be denying people experiences and performances by saying, ‘No, no, no, it’s not appropriate you should do that.’”

The argument being that an actor can still achieve “truth” by pretending to something they have not experienced? “That’s absolutely spot on. Theatrical reality is a lot more complex than some people think. If the ‘authenticity’ rules had been in place for the last 100 years, we would have missed so many performances. I still want to explore everything as an actor.”

After shooting season three of Star Trek: Picard, he plans to take several months off to complete a memoir. He’s reached page 310 and it’s called Are You Anybody? The title has been percolating for decades. “On my first RSC opening night at Stratford-on-Avon, I was playing the Earl of somewhere in Henry IV, tiny part. There was a group of autograph-hunters at the stage door, and someone thrust the programme at me to sign, then pulled it away again and said, ‘Are you anybody?’ And I said, ‘No, nobody at all,’ and walked away. But the importance of that question has stayed with me ever since.”

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‘Star Trek: Picard’: Patrick Stewart on Why He Returned to the Final Frontier

By Daniel Holloway

Daniel Holloway

Executive Editor, TV

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Next to an armchair in Patrick Stewart ’s living room in Brooklyn sits a small table, and on it a black three-ring binder. The 79-year-old actor leans in and clasps his hands when recounting his upbringing in the North of England. He stands and paces when a subject such as Brexit or Donald Trump aggravates him. All the while, he touches the binder over and over again — tapping it, thumbing through it, waving it around.

Inside is the script for Stewart’s one-man stage adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” which he began performing three decades ago, around the same time he originated the role of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” It’s early December, and next week Stewart, for the first time in 16 years, will once again perform “A Christmas Carol” — in which he portrays more than 30 characters. The run: just two nights at a 99-seat theater on 54th Street.

“This is just stupid, doing something like this,” Stewart says, sitting forward in a midcentury lounge chair, holding the binder up in one hand as if it were Exhibit A. “It’s so insane. I could have found other things to do that were not so enormous as this. But I chose it. Sixteen years have passed, and the world is a different place from when I last did it. F—, it’s different.”

It sure is. And Stewart believes that makes the piece more timely than ever. He characterizes “A Christmas Carol” as a “profoundly angry attack” on a society that treats marginalized people as subhuman. “Forget about Tiny Tim and all that stuff,” he says. “It’s a political document.”

So it’s no surprise that, after a long absence, Stewart has revisited the story at the end of the second decade of this thus-far miserable millennium. His motivations — to challenge himself, to speak to injustice, to give himself the sense of calm in anxious times that acting has provided since he was a grammar-school boy in England — are the same ones that prompted him to return to the role that made him one of the most beloved actors alive: Picard.

On Jan. 23, CBS All Access will debut “ Star Trek: Picard ,” a series in which Stewart reprises the thoughtful, cultured, bald starship captain he played for seven seasons on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and in a string of four feature films that ended in 2002. The new show is different from its predecessor in nearly every respect — texture, tone, format, production value, even the likelihood of characters dropping an f-bomb. That’s all by design. Stewart’s design.

“He is uninterested in repeating himself,” says Alex Kurtzman, the show’s creator and executive producer, and the mastermind behind CBS’ effort to not just revive “Star Trek” but also transform it into a vast narrative universe in the Marvel mold. “Everything he does is filled with innate integrity. He fights for the things he believes in. And he’s very willing to collaborate once you’re on the same wavelength.”

Lo-fi and a little quaint by today’s standards, “The Next Generation” was the most successful of any “Star Trek” television series. (The original, starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, was poorly rated and canceled by NBC after three seasons.) The show raked in Emmy nominations, minted money for Paramount Television and grew a massive following attracted to the unlikely figure of Stewart’s Picard — a Frenchman (with a posh English accent) who sips tea, reads the classics and prizes duty and honor and friendship. “The Next Generation” presented a humanist future in which issues like poverty, race and class have long been sorted out, and conflicts are more often resolved through negotiation and problem-solving than at the point of a phaser pistol.

Stewart had no desire to go there again.

“I think what we’re trying to say is important,” he says. “The world of ‘Next Generation’ doesn’t exist anymore. It’s different. Nothing is really safe. Nothing is really secure.”

“I think what we’re trying to say is important. The world of ‘Next Generation’ doesn’t exist anymore.” Patrick Stewart

Science fiction — a genre Stewart had little use for before he became one of its major figures — has long been a way to address the anxieties of the nonfictional present. That Stewart would want to use it thusly at a time when the compassion of the U.S. and Britain for the world’s neediest is at a nadir should be expected, given who he is.

Stewart grew up poor. His family’s house in Mirfield, a town of little more than 10,000 people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was a “one-up-one-down” — a room downstairs and one upstairs, connected by a stone staircase. The home had no heat aside from an open fireplace, and no hot water. The toilet was separate from the house.

“The outside toilet was my study, reading room, private place,” Stewart says. He would sit there, reading by candlelight — first American authors, such as Hemingway. Later, Russians. And then Shakespeare.

His mother was a weaver who took social pleasure from her work despite the difficult conditions. His father was a laborer and weekend alcoholic who physically abused Stewart’s mother. He was also a war hero. In 2012, Stewart appeared on the U.K. television program “Who Do You Think You Are?” and learned that his father had served as the top noncommissioned officer in his parachute regiment in World War II and likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. (In recent years, Stewart has worked with Amnesty International on issues of domestic violence against women and with a U.K. veterans’ mental health organization, Combat Stress.) Sitting in his Brooklyn home, he recalls the taping of the show and a British military official telling him that his father “must have been an extraordinary man.” Stewart pauses, and his eyes fill with tears.

“This was news to me,” he says of his father’s military service. After the war, an officer with connections in London put the elder Stewart up for the position of second doorman at The Dorchester in London. The job came with a family residence in the hotel. But his father turned it down.

“Often I’ve reflected on how different my life would have been if, at the age of 5, I’d moved to Park Lane,” Stewart says. “But he didn’t go. And he should have gone, because he would have done the job brilliantly. From time to time I go to The Dorchester, and I will say hello and shake hands with the doorman.”

When Stewart was 12 years old, an English teacher named Cecil Dormand introduced him to Shakespeare. “He started handing out these copies of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ all around the classroom, gave one to me and said, ‘Stewart, you’re Shylock. All right, Act 4, Scene 1.’” The first time Stewart held Shakespeare in his hands, he was asked to read the “pound of flesh” scene aloud.

Dormand recruited Stewart to play the role of a schoolboy in a local performance of John Dighton’s “The Happiest Days of Your Life.”

“Nothing bad could happen to me for the two and a half hours that we were doing the play, because I became somebody else,” Stewart says. “I wasn’t Patrick Stewart anymore, from Camm Lane, Mirfield. I was Hopcroft Minor in a boys’ private school. The very first thing that brought me into this business was the feeling that I was safe. And that feeling has never gone away.”

Later, Stewart had a brief stint as a newspaper reporter. But he kept performing in local theater and soon was pursuing acting full time. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, and stayed for nearly two decades.

“He plays very strong characters,” actor Ian McKellen says of Stewart. “And he looks formidable. He looks reliable. He’s the guy who you want to have in a difficult situation. ‘Captain Picard is here, don’t you worry.’ But inside that strength is a tenderness, which responds to love and affection, and which gives out the same thing to people who are closest to him.”

Stewart and McKellen became friends while working on the “X-Men” movies, and have appeared together onstage performing Beckett and Pinter. (McKellen also officiated Stewart’s wedding to singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell in 2013.) Decades ago, before the two actors were close, they ran into one another on the streets of London.

“He had had a distinguished career doing Shakespeare, and he was a leading young actor here doing the classics,” McKellen says. “He said he had been asked to go do ‘Star Trek,’ and I said, ‘Do be very careful. You’re having such a wonderful career here; to stop it to go off and do a telly that might not work is a very dangerous step.’ Thank goodness he didn’t take my advice.”

Stewart didn’t particularly want the job. But a U.S. television series represented “more money than I’d ever seen in my life.” And his agent assured him that the show would tank, freeing him to return to London.

“Everything he does is filled with innate integrity. He fights for the things he believes in.” Alex Kurtzman, “Star Trek: Picard” creator

Stewart’s path to the captain’s chair of the USS Enterprise contained one towering obstacle, however. “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry was famously resistant to Stewart’s casting. The British actor was, to his mind, too old and too bald to succeed Shatner’s swaggering James T. Kirk.

Stewart claims that Roddenberry circulated a memo at Paramount saying, “I do not want to hear Patrick Stewart’s name mentioned ever again in connection with ‘Next Generation.’”

But Roddenberry acquiesced to Stewart’s advocates, producers Robert Justman and Rick Berman. Roddenberry died in 1991, while “The Next Generation” was still on the air. “God, I wish he had not died when he did,” Stewart says. “I have a lot of respect for Gene, and I have to say also, gratitude.” He laughs and recalls how Roddenberry would visit the set once a week. “I know more than once, I caught him sitting in his director’s chair looking at me, and I knew he was thinking, ‘How the f— did we end up with this guy?’”

Stewart’s classically trained actor brain wanted guidance from Roddenberry on who Picard was. Roddenberry responded by giving him a Horatio Hornblower novel. “I could never get him to talk about it,” Stewart says. “Gene talked about golf a lot, and the Bel-Air Country Club.”

By the end of the first season, Stewart had become invested in the show. He had bonded with his American cast mates, whose looser approach to working he initially bristled at. He had also attended his first “Star Trek” convention, where, he says, “I felt like Sting.”

“The Next Generation” turned “Star Trek” from a single story about Shatner’s Kirk and Nimoy’s Spock into a franchise. In addition to the four features, it spawned two spin-offs, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “Star Trek: Voyager.”

It also presaged an era in which speculative fiction would make for premium television (“Game of Thrones,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Watchmen”). “The Next Generation” was the first syndicated program nominated for a best drama series Emmy. An episode written by Morgan Gendel, “The Inner Light,” in which a probe seizes Picard’s mind and causes him to experience an entire lifetime as a member of an alien society, became the first television episode in 25 years to win science fiction’s top literary honor, the Hugo Award.

Stewart describes himself as “very proud” of “The Next Generation,” and like other members of the cast regrets that Paramount ended the show when it did, in a drive to take the Enterprise crew into theaters. But he found himself typecast afterward. He recalls meeting with an unnamed major filmmaker who told him bluntly, “Why would I want Captain Picard in my movie?”

Stewart soon became the linchpin of another franchise, “X-Men,” playing Professor Charles Xavier. He continued to do major work onstage. And his feature and television roles alternated between those that leaned into his classical training and patriarchal image (Captain Ahab in an adaptation of “Moby Dick” for USA Network, a gay Manhattanite living through the height of the AIDS epidemic in Christopher Ashley’s “Jeffrey”) and against it (a white supremacist leader in Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room,” a pill-popping cable-news jockey in Jonathan Ames and Seth MacFarlane’s Starz comedy “Blunt Talk”). It wasn’t until his last “X-Men” exploit, starring in 2017 with Hugh Jackman in director James Mangold’s “Logan,” that he imagined a return to Picard could be desirable.

“Hugh and I were so thrilled when the last thing we did for ‘X-Men’ was ‘Logan,’” he says. “It was the best ‘X-Men’ experience we both had, because we were the same characters but their world had been blown apart.” He adds, “‘Next Generation’ didn’t end like that. In fact, our last movie, ‘Nemesis,’ was pretty weak.”

Released in 2002, “Nemesis” lost money for Paramount. But J.J. Abrams’ 2009 film reimagining Kirk and Spock, now played by Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, cleared a path for CBS to revive the franchise for TV. Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller’s “Star Trek: Discovery,” a prequel to the original series, would become the cornerstone of streaming service CBS All Access.

Stewart had resisted past overtures from “Star Trek”-curious producers. When he met in his kitchen with Kurtzman and writers Michael Chabon and Akiva Goldsman in 2017, he did so as a courtesy.

“I explained to them all those elements of ‘Next Generation’ which belong in ‘Next Generation,’ and why I didn’t want to go near them again,” he says. “But they talked about it in such an interesting way. And they talked for a long time.” Stewart told the producers no, thank you, and sent them on their way. Then he had an immediate change of heart. He told his agent to ask Kurtzman to put his ideas in writing. Forty-eight hours later, Kurtzman sent over a more-than-30-page packet outlining a possible Picard series.

“Picard” finds its hero living in near-isolation on a very un-cosmic French vineyard. He is retired and estranged from Starfleet, the interstellar navy to which he devoted most of his life. He’s haunted by a pair of catastrophes, one personal, the other societal — the death of his android colleague Lt. Cmdr. Data (as seen in “Nemesis”) and a refugee crisis spawned by the destruction of the planet Romulus (as seen in Abrams’ “Star Trek”). When those two seemingly disparate strands of his life cross, Picard returns to action, this time without the backing of a Starfleet whose moral center has shifted.

Roddenberry believed that in the future, human beings would advance to the point that they would, essentially, not have conflict with one another. Their biggest challenges would be external.

Stewart, also an exec producer on “Picard,” insists, “We are remaining very faithful to Gene Roddenberry’s notion of what the future might be like.” But rigid adherence to that notion is clearly not what he’s here for.

“In a way, the world of ‘Next Generation’ had been too perfect and too protected,” he says. “It was the Enterprise. It was a safe world of respect and communication and care and, sometimes, fun.” In “Picard,” the Federation — a union of planets bonded by shared democratic values — has taken an isolationist turn. The new show, Stewart says, “was me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump and feeling, ‘Why hasn’t the Federation changed? Why hasn’t Starfleet changed?’ Maybe they’re not as reliable and trustworthy as we all thought.”

Real-world parallels are not hard to identify. It is one week before the parliamentary election that will see British prime minister and Brexit hardliner Boris Johnson’s Conservatives win a staggering victory over their Labour rivals. And Stewart is not feeling optimistic about the near future.

“I’m not sure which one of us is in the most trouble,” he says of Britain and the United States. “I think it’s actually the U.K. I think we’re f—ed, completely f—ed.” He points to studies predicting decades-long economic damage inflicted by the country’s looming withdrawal from the European Union. Of the U.S., he says, “There is a time limit to your f—ed state, which is four years away.” He expresses hope that “the United States that has given us the Trump administration” can change, but adds, “He will likely get reelected.”

These are not the opinions of someone who, on the cusp of 80, is disengaging from the world. “Next Generation” alum Jonathan Frakes, who reprises his role as Cmdr. William Riker in “Picard” and directed two episodes of the new show’s first season, believes that age has only heightened Stewart’s powers.

“Patrick has become sillier as he’s gotten older,” Frakes says. “His sense of humor is wild. His ability to be playful and more vulnerable makes him and his work more layered. He’s 79 and has a very full résumé, so his confidence in his work allows him, I think, to be confident in his personal life. And he’s at ease. It’s a great ease to be with him. Anybody who’s in this business as an actor could look to that career and say, ‘That’s a success.’”

In the week ahead, Stewart will not only perform “A Christmas Carol” for the first time in more than a decade and a half, he’ll also entertain Chabon and Goldsman at his home and hear their pitch for “Picard” Season 2. He says of Mangold: “I can’t wait to work with James again.” He expresses an enthusiasm for his recent turn in Elizabeth Banks’ “Charlie’s Angels” reboot (“Great tongue-in-cheek fun!”) that is undamaged by the photon-torpedo hit the movie took at the box office.

“I’ve been doing some really interesting work for the last few years,” Stewart says. He thinks back to 1987, when “The Next Generation” premiered. “There was not a corner of my life, public, private, that wasn’t touched by this sudden transformation. And I so enjoyed it. ‘X-Men,’ ‘Star Trek’ and then, having come back 18 months ago to do ‘Picard,’ I’ve just …”

He pauses and places a hand on the black binder. “God, this is going to be difficult to say. It’s wonderful work, but it’s not enough. The challenge is great, but I want something bigger.”

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‘Star Trek: Picard’s Patrick Stewart On How He Finally Allowed More Of Himself To Inform His Portrayal Of His Iconic Starfleet Hero — Contenders TV

By Scott Huver

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After over three decades of embodying Starfleet’s legendary Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Picard star Sir Patrick Stewart says he’s finally learned to embrace letting more of himself bleed over into his much-beloved character.

“My approach to my work has undergone significant changes in the last few years,” Stewart explained during Deadline’s Contenders Television panel for the series. “And it has changed and developed because I’ve come to trust Patrick Stewart more than I used to and find that my instincts, my impulses, my feelings and emotions are authentic.”

Contenders TV: Deadline’s Complete Coverage

The veteran actor said that, after decades of resistance, he now accepts that “Jean-Luc Picard is Patrick Stewart, and I am him. There is no separation anymore. I used my life continually when we were shooting Season Two and Three of Picard , and I’m no longer afraid of doing that, which at one time in my career I would have been. But not anymore. I feel I have something to say, and I can only say it through the performances that I give.”

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In terms of his approach to his role, Stewart said the first seeds of possibility were planted when executive producer Alex Kurtzman, the guiding figure of the current Star Trek television franchise, first suggested that Picard’s evolution might mirror Stewart’s own.

“He said ‘It’s over 30 years since you were last Jean-Luc Picard,” Stewart revealed. “You’ve probably changed somewhat in that time in those 30 years: different opinions, different feelings, maybe even ways of working. Well,’ he said, ‘maybe that’s happened to Jean-Luc as well’…I was caught up by that. How do I, how do I be convincing that 25-30 years have passed, and this is not the same Jean-Luc that we all came to know and, some of us, to love.”

Stewart also discussed taking on a more hands-on role behind the scenes than he’d previously held on his prior Star Trek: The Next Generation series and films. “I was involved up to here,” he said. “I had, for the first time, an executive co-producer title attached to my name, and I was consulted. People were very, very generous and we talked about everything.”

Deadline Contenders Television Arrivals – Day 2 Photo Gallery

Ultimately, the actor helped chart an unexpected course for the role that would inform three seasons of the Paramount+ streaming series that would challenge both the character and himself. “Picard had to face a reality about his childhood and his home life and his parents that he had never ever faced before. Why? Because he was afraid, and an afraid Jean-Luc is a pretty rare creature, but to have that undercurrent of unexpected emotion running through Season 2, and coming to a climax of course in Season 3, was very satisfying.”

Stewart also revealed that shooting Season 3 immediately following Season 2, he’d already shared scenes with his longtime TNG cast mates, who were recently revealed to be joining him in the forthcoming final season.

“I’m with Gates [McFadden] and Marina [Sirtis] and Jonathan [Frakes] and Brent [Spiner] and LeVar [Burton] and Michael [Dorn], and those days have been wonderful,” he reported. “I think it’s hard for the directors because we fool about so much! And it was always like that – I mean, you’ve probably heard that famous thing that I said it during our first season when somebody said, ‘Patrick, we’ve got to have some fun,’ because I was complaining about the disruptions and the noise, and I said ‘We are not here to have fun!’”

Check out the panel video above.

Deadline Contenders Television is sponsored by  Apple TV+ ,  Eyepetizer ,  Final Draft ,  Los Siete Misterios  and  Michter’s . Partners include  Desalto ,  Film AlUla ,  Four Seasons Resort Maui ,  Jason Mizrahi Design ,  ModMD ,  The American Pavilion , and  Tidelli .

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Patrick Stewart's potential Picard wig flew British Airways solo for 'Star Trek' audition: Memoir

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Before Patrick Stewart could boldly go where no person had gone before as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," his hairpiece had to fly solo on British Airways.

Producers of the "Star Trek" spinoff insisted on transporting Stewart's wig from London to Los Angeles by plane for the British actor's final audition. The wig's "hairy drama" (that's Sir Patrick's pun) is one of the many stories that Stewart, 83, doles out in "Making It So: A Memoir" (Galley Books, 480 pages, out now).

Cooler heads prevailed to cast Stewart without the hairpiece after producers stepped in to say hello post-audition, presumably to get a look at the actor without his wig. The hiring launched Stewart, making Picard the baddest bald head in the Alpha Quadrant through "The Next Generation" (1987 to 1994), four feature films and "Star Trek: Picard" (2020 to 2023).

"Making It So" is a nod to Picard's iconic catchphrase, which also describes Stewart's unlikely trek from his working-class English upbringing ("with neither a toilet nor a bathroom") to the captain's chair. Global fame, starring as Professor X in the X-Men movie series, becoming BFFs with Hugh Jackman and being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II followed.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

• "Making it So: A Memoir" at Amazon for $25
• "Making it So: A Memoir" at Bookshop.org for $32

USA TODAY asked Stewart to elaborate on key points from the book:

Patrick Stewart was cast as Captain Picard over the objections of 'Star Trek' creator Gene Roddenberry

"Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry didn't want Stewart starring as the "Next Generation" captain, which was made clear during a disastrous 10-minute first meeting at Roddenberry's Hollywood Hills home and in heated casting discussions afterward.

"There were weeks of fierce arguments, before (Roddenberry) stepped aside, which is extraordinary," Stewart says.

Finally earning the lead role in the seven-season series changed Stewart's life immediately. While his co-stars like Jonathan Frakes (as William Riker) bought luxury cars, Stewart giddily threw down on a Honda Prelude.

"Jonathan said to me, 'What the hell are you driving?' And I said, 'I drove a Honda in London and loved it,' " says Stewart, who eventually caught the luxury car bug.

Even while Stewart became a global star as the beloved Picard, Roddenberry, who died in 1991, never accepted the casting.

"Occasionally, I would see (Roddenberry) on set sitting with his head in his hands, just staring at me," says Stewart, laughing. "And I knew he was saying, 'How the hell did he get that part?' Anyway, may he rest in peace."

'Star Trek: Nemisis' villain Tom Hardy wanted nothing to do with tight-knit 'Next Generation' cast

Stewart credits the success of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" to a "wonderful" ensemble cast that included Frakes, Brent Spiner as the android Data, and LeVar Burton as Geordi La Forge. After the second movie, 1996's "Star Trek: First Contact," became a hit, he was convinced of a franchise, which fizzled after disappointments like 2002's "Star Trek: Nemesis."

"Nemesis" starred the "odd, solitary" young British actor Tom Hardy as the movie’s villain Shinzon, who was antisocial right up to his final exit without a goodbye, which prompted Stewart to muse, "And there goes someone I think we shall never hear of again.”

"As a cast, we had been together for 12 years, and this one person just didn't seem to fit in. I don't know what happened. Maybe he will write it in a memoir one day," says Stewart, who tips his cap to Hardy's success. "He turned into the most brilliant actor we have making movies today. I'm thrilled by that."

Patrick Stewart recalls being chased by paparazzi 'like a plague of insects'

Stewart was mostly able to avoid unwanted media attention, except during the breakdown of his first marriage to Sheila Falconer (they divorced in 1990). His relationship with "Next Generation" guest star Jennifer Hetrick attracted paparazzi, who pursued the couple in a dangerous car chase before Stewart could flag down police.

"That was the only time really that I experienced it, being followed, chased and actually trapped in my car while they came to the car window," says Stewart, who was "deeply shaken" after the incident.

Stewart is contrite writing about his divorce from Falconer, who had remained in London while he worked in Los Angeles.

"The memoir is the story of my life, and I've tried to be as authentic as possible," Stewart says. "My first divorce was harrowing. And I was to blame for it being harrowing."

Why Patrick Stewart didn't get the ending he truly wanted for 'Picard'

Stewart returned to his beloved Picard character in 2020 for three seasons of "Star Trek: Picard." The connection between the star and his seminal character was so great that Stewart wanted to end the series with Picard at total peace with a wife, just as Stewart is content with his third wife, musician Sunny Ozell.

The writers crafted a short scene with Picard eyeing his vineyard, a dog at his side before a woman’s voice is heard calling, “Jean-Luc? Supper’s ready!"

But in the time crunch of shooting the final "Picard" episode, Stewart offered to hold off on the scene.

"I am the person who is to blame for the 'Picard' series not ending like that. On the final shooting day, we had so much work to do, I thought, 'We can come back and do that moment anytime.' But we never came back and shot the scene."

Stewart loves the series' final scene, however, which shows Picard toasting his comrades with Shakespeare during a rowdy bar session.

"That is so spot-on accurate for the quality of life that we as actors and crew had with the show. The raising of glasses, laughing and joking. This was our world."

'A low point in my life': William Shatner remembers 'Star Trek' cancellation

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Patrick Stewart says his time on 'Star Trek' felt like a ministry

Rachel Martin

Legendary actor Patrick Stewart talks about his time on Star Trek and supernatural experiences that have shaped his spirituality.

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

It's Sunday, which means it is time to reflect on how we each find meaning in our lives with our Enlighten Me series with Rachel Martin. This week, she has a guest that is beloved by millions of fans, especially those who like to boldly go where no man has gone before.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Sometimes you find comfort in the most unusual places. It was 1997, and I was living in Japan, teaching English to middle school kids. I lived in a tiny village. And in those early days especially, I was pretty lonely, except for my good friends Jean-Luc and Data. The teacher who had lived in my apartment before had left a huge box of VHS tapes. There were enough episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" to keep me company for the duration of my time there. So don't worry, I did make real friends in Japan, but that show, those characters navigating the galaxy, were an important touchstone as I explored my own new world. For the most devoted of fans, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" represents far more.

PATRICK STEWART: Its impact on so many people has been extraordinary, ranging from people saying that it became their education to others who said, I was going to end my life, but I couldn't because I wouldn't be able to see "Star Trek" anymore.

MARTIN: That unforgettable voice is that of Sir Patrick Stewart, who played the captain of the Starship Enterprise on "The Next Generation" for seven seasons and in four feature films, and he stars in the latest TV iteration of the franchise, "Picard." I got to talk with Stewart about his new memoir called "Making It So."

There is a bit in the book, early in your career - I think it was your first job - but you were an assistant stage manager. It was your first job in the industry. And you write this beautiful description of what it felt like to be on the stage. And I wondered if you would read that for me.

STEWART: Yes, I can.

MARTIN: Thank you.

STEWART: (Reading) At the end of each performance, I waited for the last actor and the staff to leave the theater before switching off the lights and locking up for the night. Actually, I left on one light in accordance with an old theater tradition whereby a single bare bulb is left on, hanging over the center of the stage. With the theater otherwise deserted, I stood beneath this light every night, taking a moment to breathe in the auditorium and the vibrations of the audience that had just left it. I looked at the set, only recently populated by our company of actors. I was part of all this now. Indeed, I had responsibilities to fulfill, even if they were as a lowly assistant stage manager. This, I thought, is now my home.

MARTIN: Maybe I am projecting, but there is, I think, a sacred quality to how you describe that space. Is that accurate? Did you sense that kind of reverence or sacredness about the theater?

STEWART: Oh, yes.

MARTIN: Yeah.

STEWART: To stand in the middle of an empty stage in an empty theater and feel that I was at home was everything. But it took a while for me to get there.

MARTIN: Did you feel that on a television set?

STEWART: No, I didn't. Cameras made me nervous.

MARTIN: Yeah. You were not Gene Roddenberry's first pick to play Jean-Luc Picard. Taking this role was also going to take you really far from your wife and kids, who lived back in England.

STEWART: Yeah.

MARTIN: Why did you take it?

STEWART: I wasn't going to take it. Indeed, a dear - very dear friend of mine and a very important English actor had said to me, don't do this, Patrick. It's not what you need to do. You're a very good stage actor. That's where you ought to be. Don't do it. Because I had learnt that the contract that I was being offered, which was six years - but I was told we would be lucky to make it through the first season. So don't worry about that. I remember one actor saying to me, look, you know, sign up for this, do six months' work, make some money for the first time in your life and get well-known, get a suntan and go home. And I thought, yeah, that doesn't sound too bad. I could live with that. And, of course, our first series lasted seven seasons, and then we made four feature films.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTIN: I talk to a lot of people about spirituality and about the value of spiritual communities, which I think are when people who have similar values gather together and have or seek transcendent experiences. And I think "Star Trek," in all of its incarnations, represents that to a lot of fans. It is a spiritual world. They treat it with religious reverence. Have you encountered that? I mean, do you get it?

STEWART: Yes. I see it very, very clearly and very strongly. It was about truth and fairness and honesty and respect for others, no matter who they were or what strange alien creature they looked like. That was immaterial. They were alive. And if they needed help, Jean-Luc Picard and his crew, his team, were there to give it. So, yes, in a sense, we were ministers. And I have heard now so many times from individuals who have been honest enough and brave enough to tell me aspects of their life, of their health, of their mental health, and how it was all saved and improved by watching every week.

MARTIN: I mean, how did that sit with you? That's an awful lot of responsibility, to be that minister. I mean, you're an actor in a show, and people ascribe to you this wisdom, you as a moral compass for them

STEWART: Yes. I was proud of it and what we did. And I talked to Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton. We talked about this kind of thing often. And it's a glorious feeling 'cause we're just having a good time. We love our jobs. I love acting. And it's...

MARTIN: But didn't that feel incongruous that you are...

STEWART: No.

MARTIN: ...You're acting and you're having fun and - but it had this profound impact? No?

STEWART: It didn't feel at all incongruous because, particularly given the role I was playing, was a man of such profound understanding and empathy. And to feel like that as a person was such a reward for what we were doing because we were enjoying our work, our job. But at the same time, we were changing people's lives.

MARTIN: Did playing Jean-Luc Picard make you a better person?

STEWART: It gave me an idea of how I might become a better person, yes. I was able to absorb that and make those feelings a strong and firm part of my life.

MARTIN: There are several references in your book to the supernatural - experiencing spirits or even hearing your mother's voice after she died. Do you believe in spirits? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in things that are bigger than us like that?

STEWART: Yes. Bigger than us - yes. I believe in presence. And that was why, I think, when I was an assistant stage manager in my first job, I stood on that empty stage under one light - bare light bulb. Because while I was there, breathing quietly, it was as though I was surrounded by all the hundreds of actors who had been on that stage for the last hundred years. And the sense of a presence of good and the presence of evil is what I ascribe all my experiences of this kind to. I believe in it. I don't talk about it very much. It's - and I'm a little uncomfortable talking about it because it sounds wacky but it isn't, actually.

MARTIN: Yeah, but you're Patrick Stewart and you can talk about whatever you want. And...

STEWART: (Laughter).

MARTIN: I mean, come on.

STEWART: Oh, thank you.

MARTIN: You don't have anything left to prove.

STEWART: Thank you. Thank you.

MARTIN: Let me ask you, though. Our time is very short, and I just have one more question. Does your feeling about transcendence and spirits - does that extend to a possible afterlife? You are 83. You have lost a lot of people in your life. You have had to say goodbye to people who have died. What do you think happens? Have you thought about your own mortality in that way?

STEWART: I don't know what happens, but I have a very, very deep and acute feeling that there is more than this life that we lead. But I know, in some people who I've had relationships with, this has been an obsessive set of feelings that they have - fearful and harmful feelings. And instead, I am determined to see them differently. But with - by simply...

MARTIN: You mean seeing the end of life differently?

STEWART: Yes, as a closure of a chapter, not the end of existence. And I believe in that. Increasingly now, as I get older, I brood a little about this, but not despairingly, not depressedly (ph) at all. But just asking myself, am I ready?

MARTIN: Are you, or is that still the journey? That is the longing - to be ready.

STEWART: Yes. I'm getting close, very close. And I am experiencing happiness on a level and of an intensity that I've never experienced in my life before.

MARTIN: I'm so pleased for you.

STEWART: Thank you.

MARTIN: The book is called "Making It So," the aptly titled memoir from actor Patrick Stewart. Sir Patrick, what a pleasure. Thank you so much.

STEWART: And for me too, a great pleasure and a privilege to have been talking to you.

DETROW: You can hear more of Rachel Martin's Enlighten Me series right here, same time next week.

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