Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen became friends while working on XMen, and McKellen was dubious of Stewart doing StarTrek: 'Thank goodness he didn’t take my advice'
,” 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.
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.
“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.”
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. 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.Alex Kurtzman, “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.
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.” 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 and against it . 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.
“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 and a refugee crisis spawned by the destruction of the planet Romulus .
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.
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