Return of a sci-fi icon
As Star Trek returns to our screens, Patrick Stewart, 79, talks to Ben Hoyle about the dark politics of the new series Picard, why playing Macbeth sent him over the edge and how his wife keeps him young.
The older Patrick Stewart gets, the more he wonders what he’s doing. ‘‘I used to do quite a lot of teaching at one time,’’ he says. ‘‘I do less now because people want me to talk about acting and I’m not sure I know any more how I do it.’’
That extravagantly sonorous voice, familiar to millions from Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men films, sounds uncertain. ‘‘I used to have very concrete ideas about what my process was. Now the process seems to change with every job.’’
Stewart, 79, pauses and peers at me through his thick-framed spectacles. He is sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel suite in black Prada trainers, dark jeans and a button-down denim shirt: a picture of success. His designer blazer lies crumpled beside him. His right arm is extended along the back of the sofa. One leg is slung over the other. He is smiling, his eyes sparkling, a man apparently wholly at ease.
It is six decades since he broke free of a poor, sometimes horrifying, childhood; more than half a century since he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC); 33 years since he snared the role of Jean-Luc Picard of the starship USS Enterprise, the part that unexpectedly changed his life. The part that – to the surprise and delight of fans around the globe – he is now finally revisiting.
But the doubts linger. Stewart suddenly glances left and right and leans forward, as if anxious to avoid being overheard.
‘‘I’ll tell you this,’’ he says. ‘‘For the last few years I’ve started a new habit, particularly when I’m on stage, but if I’ve got a big challenging scene on camera I also do the same thing. I say out loud, but sometimes very softly, ‘I don’t give a f .... ’ Because I used to give too much of a f... and that held me back.’’
He grew up in the mill town of Mirfield, and the Stewart home was ‘‘one living room and a bedroom. My brother and I slept in a partitioned corner of my parents’ bedroom. For 15 years.’’
Their mother was a weaver. Their father was a ‘‘very angry’’ labourer and decorated former parachute regiment sergeant-major. He was so fearsome that someone who served with him once said that when he walked on to the parade ground ‘‘the birds in the trees stopped singing’’.
When he was drunk at weekends, Alfred Stewart was physically ‘‘brutal’’ to their mother. The children witnessed terrible things.
Stewart, who is now a patron of the domestic violence charity Refuge, was so scarred that ‘‘for many years I couldn’t act rage. I used to fake it. I refused to tap it because I was so scared about what might happen if I did’’.
There was no hot water, no central heating and little entertainment. ‘‘We had no television. My father was in charge of the radio and there was nothing you could do to get him to change channels. We didn’t have books, but there was a library.’’
Because he loved American films, he began to seek out American novels, which he would read by candlelight in the outside toilet. Then he got into Russian literature, which he was drawn to because the books were huge.
‘‘I hated finishing a novel, like I used to cry in cinemas when the movie ended because I didn’t want to leave that world.’’
When Stewart was 12, an inspirational English teacher introduced him to Shakespeare with The
Merchant of Venice. ‘‘Act IV, scene I: Stewart – you’re Shylock!’’ he recalls, grinning. The theatre became a place of sanctuary.
He left school at 15 and a decade later, via a short inglorious spell as a journalist, two years at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and a stint in repertory theatre, he made it to the RSC.
He suffered from a ‘‘profound embarrassment about lack of education’’. The directors were ‘‘such
brilliant people – Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall, you know, Cambridge graduates and very clever, very intellectual people. I thought, ‘They have to know a hell of a lot more than I know, so I’m just going to listen to them’.’’
Stewart believed then that there was only one right way for him to act. Today, he sees a problem with this rigid approach. ‘‘I don’t think I really was good at it.’’
Early on ‘‘Shakespeare was all I ever wanted to do’’ (although he also appeared in landmark British television dramas, including I, Claudius and Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy).
His big break came when he was in his mid-40s. ‘‘It was all accidental.’’
He was helping a professor friend to illustrate a lecture. A producer preparing Next Generation was in the audience. Gene Roddenberry (the creator of the original Star Trek, who died in 1991) opposed casting a ‘‘middle-aged, bald, English Shakespearean actor’’ as Picard, but was eventually convinced.
Stewart almost turned it down anyway because of the potential multi-series commitment. He signed up only because he was convinced the show would fail.
At first, he was a ‘‘pompous asshole’’, lecturing his fellow cast members that ‘‘we are not here to have fun’’. Was that his father talking? ‘‘Absolutely. [But] thanks to the wonderful people I was working with, I ended up becoming the silliest member of the cast. They showed me you can have fun and you can do really serious committed work as well.’’
Arriving on screen in 1987, Star Trek: The
Next Generation projected an optimistic view of the future in which humans lived largely in harmony and characters sought to resolve conflicts through negotiation and ingenuity rather than force.
It was brainier and better acted than the pioneering 1960s original – and much more popular. While the William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy Star
Trek was axed after three seasons and became a cult phenomenon only years later, the Patrick Stewart version was an instant hit, ran over seven series until 1994, and won 19 Emmys.
The finale was watched by more than 30 million Americans. Afterwards, the studio redeployed the crew to Hollywood. Four films followed, ending with the worst, Star Trek: Nemesis, in 2002.
Stewart had loved Picard, but 15 years of playing the same tea-drinking, Shakespeare-loving, morally upstanding Frenchman was more than enough.
He was immersed by then in a new big-screen franchise, as Charles Xavier, the mind-reading mutant founder of the X-Men, whom he would play for 17 years until 2017’s Logan, one of the most critically acclaimed superhero films made to date.
His stage career had taken off again. He won a third Olivier award as Claudius in an RSC Hamlet and was unforgettable as the lead in Rupert Goold’s 2007 Soviet-era staging of Macbeth.
Stewart, who has a plan to do another show with Goold (‘‘maybe Shakespeare’’, he teases) got ‘‘a great kick out of playing Macbeth’’, but it came at a cost.
‘‘I did it and nothing else for a year. It screwed me up eventually . . . I would do the show and go home and start drinking and just drink until I passed out. It was the only way I could erase the night.’’
No other role produced such ‘‘crazy’’ behaviour. ‘‘But you live a life like Macbeth eight times a week and say lines that are absolutely dreadful, and mean them.’’ He shivers.
‘‘Luckily, before that run ended, I met [the woman] who is now my wife [his third, singer Sunny Ozell]. I think she saved me.’’
All along he had remained convinced that he was ‘‘done’’ with Picard. ‘‘I felt that I had said everything that had to be said about the character and I was very content to let that work stand as it was.’’
So when he was contacted two years ago with yet another proposal for a Star Trek reboot, his immediate instinct was to reject it. Then he saw the writers attached, including Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Chabon and Oscar-winner Akiva Goldsman, and agreed to a meeting because ‘‘I wanted to explain to them carefully and in detail why I was going to turn them down’’. It didn’t take long for them to change his mind.
Star Trek: Picard, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, has a notably darker tone and much higher production values than
Next Generation.
It opens with its hero retired on the family vineyard and haunted by guilt over the death of his android colleague, Lieutenant-Commander Data.
Picard is also appalled by the isolationist turn taken by Starfleet. The once noble organisation to which he devoted his career has ‘‘slunk’’ from its responsibilities to address a refugee crisis set off by the destruction of the planet Romulus.
He condemns his own inaction, too. ‘‘I haven’t been living,’’ he growls. ‘‘I’ve been waiting to die.’’
The choice of a refugee crisis to anchor the series ‘‘was not a coincidence’’, says Stewart.
A lifelong Labour supporter, he has said the show, on which he serves as an executive producer, is ‘‘me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump’’.
He has also said he thinks Britain and the United States are ‘‘f...ed’’, although he recognises that others view things differently.
‘‘I know millions of people think it’s a wonderful world and that everything is going to get better once we’re out of the European Union, once the [US] Constitution is changed and American presidents can be president for as long as they want to be.’’
Will those people be turned off by the perception it is political television? ‘‘I don’t think they will. It’s there to be seen if you want to look for it.’’
What will he bring to Picard that’s different this time? ‘‘Much more of me. I’ve gone the whole hog into just letting myself be him.’’
Some of that is to do with age. Stewart struggles with names, has arthritic hands and gets tired working 12-hour days. Picard reflects that.
‘‘Weariness takes over. But then there is a good thing, too. I haven’t even talked to my wife about this. The weariness creates a vulnerability [in the performance]. And actually that’s what I’ve been searching for.’’
Not that he is fading away. At all. ‘‘I think I have more good times now than I used to have,’’ he says.
He’s great on Twitter. He’s a passionate supporter of Huddersfield Town FC. In his day he was ‘‘a very enthusiastic, not to say violent defender’’.
‘‘I actually broke someone’s leg once, which was horrible.’’ The next weekend he heard ‘‘the word has gone out and they’re going to get you’’. He never played again. Other interests range from politics to beekeeping and jigsaw puzzles.
Stewart is in brazen denial about his age. ‘‘I’m in my 80th year. I don’t believe it. I’m going to wake up one morning and find that I’m still 45.’’
Having a much younger wife (Ozell is 41) has had ‘‘a big impact on that’’. So has his passion for his job, which he cannot explain other than to say acting for him is like ‘‘being in a very expensive playgroup’’.
Even when not on set or at the theatre ‘‘I am in a sense always working, looking into the future and what I might do’’, he says.
Are there any giant ambitions left then? ‘‘Lord, yes!’’ He sighs. ‘‘And I’ve got to stay well enough and strong enough so that I can attempt some of them.’’