Sir Patrick: I’m becoming American to f ight Trump
‘Did not directly insult the President’
SIR Patrick Stewart is applying for US citizenship so he can join the ‘fight’ against Donald Trump.
The Star Trek and X-Men actor said he wanted to speak out against the President – but felt he couldn’t in case his activism got him thrown out of the country.
The 76-year-old, who was born in West Yorkshire, qualifies for US citizenship because he’s married to Sunny Ozell, 38, an American singer, and lives in New York. Speaking on US TV show The View, Sir Patrick said that becoming an American would give him the security he needed to take the fight to Mr Trump.
The star said: ‘I want to be an American. All of my friends in Washington said there is one thing you can do: “Fight, fight oppose, oppose!” But I can’t do it because I’m not a citizen.’
The US government can revoke visas at any time, and green card holders from seven countries were barred from the US under Mr Trump’s travel ban, although it has been halted by a federal judge.
Sir Patrick, who has largely lived in America since filming Star Trek: The Next Generation there in the 1980s, has a long history of activism.
He has previously campaigned about gay rights, domestic violence and post-traumatic stress disorder, which his father suffered after the Second World War.
In the interview, the Shakespearean actor elaborated on a tweet he had posted on February 10 while staying in Washington. He wrote: ‘Had the worst sleep of my life last night. But I was sleeping less than 300 yards from where Donald Trump sleeps. Could there be a connection?’
The actor was seeking advice from ‘insiders’ about how to resist the Trump administration.
But he told the talk show that it was meant as a ‘fairly innocent tweet’ and he did not ‘directly insult the President’.
Joy Behar, one of the hosts, asked him if the UK would like to take him off America’s hands. But he refused, saying : ‘We have our own problems [in Britain], we have Brexit’.
Sir Patrick met Miss Ozell, his third wife, in 2008, when he was performing in Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The couple were married by Sir Patrick’s friend Sir Ian McKellen, on the banks of Lake Tahoe in California in 2012.
But, although it seems the star can’t wait to become an American citizen, he hasn’t always found the country so appealing.
In 2015, he said he was dismayed to find that snobbery isn’t confined to the UK.
He said: ‘[Status] is an essential part of the English way of life... I expected when I came to the US that all that would be gone.’
However, he ‘quickly found out that being in a syndicated science fiction television show put me way down that hierarchical ladder’.