ANYTHING GOES
Patrick Stewart is a loose-living TV personality in ‘Blunt Talk’
Walter Blunt, the British television host in Starz’s new comedy “Blunt Talk,” wants to become a familiar, beloved television face in America.
Patrick Stewart, who plays Blunt, needs no such aspirations. He’s already there.
Almost since the moment in 1987 when he stepped into the 24th century costume of Captain Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the British-born Stewart has been a beloved and iconic figure.
Sitting at a table in the Beverly Hilton Hotel with Adrian Scarborough, who plays Blunt’s loyal manservant Harry in “Blunt Talk,” Stewart doesn't describe himself with words like “iconic.”
Neither does he downplay them.
“It’s a lovely finish to the career experience,” he says. “All the applause, that's not something to be taken for granted or ever be tired of.”
He shares that sentiment with Walter Blunt, who hosts a show on the mythical UBS network.
Blunt’s immodest goal in “Blunt Talk,” which premieres Saturday at 9 p.m., is to make America a better country by speaking the, uh, blunt truth.
His only problem is himself. He leads a dissolute life, which among other things includes excessive drinking, drug use and indiscriminate sexual encounters.
Brilliant as he is in his on-air verbal analysis and argument, he is equally careless in matters of daily life.
At one point he parlays a simple traffic stop into a scenario where he climbs atop his car amid a phalanx of police officers and begins reciting a speech by King Claudius from “Hamlet.”
Harry drily observes that this particular speech was actually inappropriate to the occasion — one of the many little touches that this messy encounter as hilarious for the viewer as it should be mortifying for Walter.
“Of course, Walter never sees anything he does as funny,” says Stewart. “To him, it’s all deadly serious. I’ve done classic stage tragedies that were less serious than two days as Walter Blunt.
“But you don’t have to be obviously funny to be entertaining. I’m a big fan of Louis C.K., who is so funny because he feels so genuine. Chris Rock is another one like that.
“There is a tipping point at which something becomes funny. Some actors can be funny by intention. Other times it lies in the writing.” Ah, the writing. “This show is quite Shakespearian, really,” says Scarborough.
“There’s great language here,” says Stewart. “People speak in such a refined way. There is a similarity between Blunt and Macbeth. In many ways, there’s no difference.”
Stewart has the Shakespearian credentials to make that sort of assessment.
After a long career in his native Britain, primarily as a stage actor, he came to the U.S. more than a little wary of being cast in a sciencefiction television show.
Nor was he encouraged, he recalls, when he realized that having spent his life playing the likes of Claudius didn’t lend him much stature in Hollywood.
“The United Kingdom a quite hierarchical society, as everyone knows,” he says. “It’s such an essential part of the English way of life, even in show business, in the theater I grew up in.
“I expected, when I came to the United States, that all that would be gone, that I was living in a classless society in which status was of no significance at all.
“I quickly found out that being in a syndicated science fiction television show put me way down that hierarchical ladder."
He took a small room, not at all sure this “Star Trek” thing would last. Seven years and 176 episodes later, he was persuaded otherwise. He went on to play Picard in a series of “Star Trek” movies and also picked up the character of Professor Charles Xavier in the “X-Men” movies.
With memorably sharp features, all angles under a gleaming bald head, he became — to his surprise, he says — rich and famous.
And then Seth MacFarlane decided there was one thing Stewart needed to do.
“I’ve been a fan of Patrick’s for a number of years,” says MacFarlane. “And it always struck me as criminal that he had never been cast in a single-camera comedy.
“He’s very quietly, or not so quietly if you’re me, conquered every genre he has attempted. He’s done hour-long drama. He’s done live theater. He's done multicamera comedy. He’s hosted ‘SNL.’ Every time he's stepped into a new genre, he has performed as if
he’d been doing it for years. And it just seemed to me like a no-brainer.
So MacFarlane put on his producer’s hat and teamed Stewart with showrunner and executive producer Jonathan Ames for “Blunt Talk.”
Ames says his vision for the show started with the movie “Network,” in which Peter Finch’s anchorman Howard Beale famously yells, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”
“I see this show as a cross between ‘Network’ and P.G. Wodehouse,” Ames said, with the unfiltered Blunt amid a surreal world of polite, ultra-stylized, at times almost cartoonish British characters. Naturally Ames also had to tap legendary 1930s film choreographer Busby Berkeley. In one early episode, Blunt does a black-and-white dance production number with a dozen leggy starlets.
“I had seen these Busby Berkeley videos and I was fascinated with the images that he would create,” says Ames. “Something would open up like an eye. So that’s what I wanted for Patrick, to be in this eye or like a flower opening up. It was a reverse of Dante’s Circles of Hell, because he was ascending up into heaven.”
It’s a rather ambitious vision, and while Stewart says he loved the dance number, he admits the whole package isn’t something he would have envisioned on his own. “No, I hadn’t thought of being in a single-camera comedy,” he admits. “But I did an episode of ‘Frasier’ and I remembered it being fun. Then my friend David Hyde-Pierce said I should do this.
“Most of what has happened in my professional life, I never looked for. That’s why I listen when people say you should do this or that.”
As for what else he might like to play, now that he has just turned 75, Stewart nods firmly when Scarborough says, “That list is as long as your arm.”
“I think we’d both like to play many more different characters,” says Stewart. “From TV to film to stage. It just takes time.”
He admires actors, he says, who don’t follow the easy or obvious path.
“Look at Benedict Cumberbatch,” he says. “There’s no hotter actor anywhere. He could play any role he wants. But he’s going on stage to play Hamlet. That’s balls.”
Timm Sharp, l., Jason Schwartzman, r.