Patrick Stewart to Play Picard Again
Next to an armchair in Patrick Stewart'due south living room in Brooklyn sits a small table, and on it a black 3-ring binder. The 79-twelvemonth-old thespian leans in and clasps his hands when recounting his upbringing in the Northward of England. He stands and paces when a discipline such equally 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.
Within is the script for Stewart's one-man stage adaptation of "A Christmas Carol," which he began performing iii decades ago, around the same time he originated the function of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." It's early Dec, and adjacent week Stewart, for the first time in 16 years, will once again perform "A Christmas Ballad" — in which he portrays more than 30 characters. The run: just 2 nights at a 99-seat theater on 54th Street.
"This is just stupid, doing something similar this," Stewart says, sitting forward in a midcentury lounge chair, holding the binder upward in one manus as if information technology were Exhibit A. "Information technology'due south then insane. I could have plant other things to exercise that were not so enormous every bit this. Simply I chose it. Sixteen years have passed, and the earth is a different place from when I last did information technology. F—, it's dissimilar."
It sure is. And Stewart believes that makes the piece more than timely than ever. He characterizes "A Christmas Carol" as a "greatly aroused attack" on a lodge that treats marginalized people equally subhuman. "Forget about Tiny Tim and all that stuff," he says. "It's a political document."
Then it'due south no surprise that, after a long absence, Stewart has revisited the story at the end of the 2d decade of this thus-far miserable millennium. His motivations — to challenge himself, to speak to injustice, to give himself the sense of at-home in broken-hearted 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 i of the most honey actors alive: Picard.
On Jan. 23, CBS All Admission will debut "Star Trek: Picard," a series in which Stewart reprises the thoughtful, cultured, bald starship captain he played for 7 seasons on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and in a string of four feature films that concluded in 2002. The new bear witness is different from its predecessor in nearly every respect — texture, tone, format, product 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 evidence's creator and executive producer, and the mastermind behind CBS' effort to not just revive "Star Expedition" only also transform it into a vast narrative universe in the Curiosity mold. "Everything he does is filled with innate integrity. He fights for the things he believes in. And he'south very willing to collaborate in one case you're on the aforementioned wavelength."
Lo-fi and a footling quaint by today'southward standards, "The Next Generation" was the well-nigh successful of any "Star Trek" television series. (The original, starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, was poorly rated and canceled by NBC later on three seasons.) The prove raked in Emmy nominations, minted money for Paramount Goggle box 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 laurels and friendship. "The Next Generation" presented a humanist futurity in which bug like poverty, race and class have long been sorted out, and conflicts are more often resolved through negotiation and trouble-solving than at the bespeak of a phaser pistol.
Stewart had no desire to become there once more.
"I retrieve what nosotros're trying to say is important," he says. "The world of 'Side by side Generation' doesn't exist anymore. It's different. Naught is really safe. Cypher is really secure."
"I remember what we're trying to say is of import. The world of 'Next Generation' doesn't be anymore."
Patrick Stewart
Scientific discipline fiction — a genre Stewart had petty utilise 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 apply it thusly at a time when the compassion of the U.South. and Great 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 boondocks of petty more than x,000 people in the W Riding of Yorkshire, was a "one-up-one-downward" — a room downstairs and one upstairs, connected by a rock staircase. The home had no estrus aside from an open fireplace, and no hot water. The toilet was split up from the house.
"The outside toilet was my study, reading room, individual identify," Stewart says. He would sit at that place, reading past candlelight — first American authors, such as Hemingway. Later, Russians. And and then Shakespeare.
His mother was a weaver who took social pleasance 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.M. boob tube program "Who Do You lot Retrieve Yous Are?" and learned that his father had served every bit the top noncommissioned officer in his parachute regiment in World War Ii and probable suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. (In recent years, Stewart has worked with Immunity International on issues of domestic violence against women and with a U.K. veterans' mental wellness organization, Gainsay Stress.) Sitting in his Brooklyn dwelling house, he recalls the taping of the show and a British military official telling him that his male parent "must have been an extraordinary human." Stewart pauses, and his eyes fill with tears.
"This was news to me," he says of his father'southward military service. Afterward the state of war, an officer with connections in London put the elder Stewart upwardly for the position of second doorman at The Dorchester in London. The task came with a family residence in the hotel. Simply 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. "Simply he didn't go. And he should take gone, because he would have done the job brilliantly. From fourth dimension to fourth dimension I go to The Dorchester, and I will say howdy and shake hands with the doorman."
When Stewart was 12 years old, an English language 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 Pocket-sized in a boys' private school. The very commencement thing that brought me into this business organisation 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 total fourth dimension. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Visitor in 1966, and stayed for nearly two decades.
"He plays very strong characters," player Ian McKellen says of Stewart. "And he looks formidable. He looks reliable. He's the guy who y'all desire to have in a difficult state of affairs. 'Helm Picard is here, don't you lot worry.' But inside that forcefulness 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 take appeared together onstage performing Beckett and Pinter. (McKellen also officiated Stewart'southward wedding to singer-songwriter Sunny Ozell in 2013.) Decades ago, earlier the 2 actors were shut, they ran into one some other on the streets of London.
"He had had a distinguished career doing Shakespeare, and he was a leading immature player here doing the classics," McKellen says. "He said he had been asked to become practise 'Star Trek,' and I said, 'Exercise be very careful. Y'all're having such a wonderful career here; to stop it to go off and practice a telly that might non work is a very unsafe footstep.' Thank goodness he didn't take my communication."
Stewart didn't especially want the task. But a U.S. television series represented "more money than I'd always seen in my life." And his agent bodacious him that the prove 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 Expedition: Picard" creator
Stewart'south path to the captain'due south chair of the USS Enterprise contained one towering obstruction, nonetheless. "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry was famously resistant to Stewart'south casting. The British actor was, to his listen, as well old and too bald to succeed Shatner'due south swaggering James T. Kirk.
Stewart claims that Roddenberry circulated a memo at Paramount maxim, "I do not desire to hear Patrick Stewart'due south name mentioned always again in connectedness with 'Adjacent 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 non 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 than once, I defenseless 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 player 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 most information technology," Stewart says. "Gene talked virtually golf game a lot, and the Bel-Air Country Club."
Past the stop of the offset season, Stewart had become invested in the show. He had bonded with his American cast mates, whose looser arroyo to working he initially bristled at. He had also attended his first "Star Trek" convention, where, he says, "I felt similar 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 Expedition: Deep Infinite 9" and "Star Expedition: Voyager."
Information technology also presaged an era in which speculative fiction would make for premium boob tube ("Game of Thrones," "The Handmaid'south Tale," "Watchmen"). "The Adjacent Generation" was the first syndicated program nominated for a best drama series Emmy. An episode written by Morgan Gendel, "The Inner Lite," in which a probe seizes Picard's heed and causes him to experience an unabridged lifetime as a member of an alien society, became the beginning television episode in 25 years to win scientific discipline fiction's meridian literary honour, the Hugo Award.
Stewart describes himself as "very proud" of "The Side by side Generation," and like other members of the cast regrets that Paramount ended the bear witness when it did, in a drive to have the Enterprise crew into theaters. Just he found himself typecast later. He recalls coming together with an unnamed major filmmaker who told him bluntly, "Why would I want Helm Picard in my movie?"
Stewart soon became the linchpin of some other franchise, "Ten-Men," playing Professor Charles Xavier. He continued to do major work onstage. And his feature and television set roles alternated between those that leaned into his classical preparation and patriarchal image (Captain Ahab in an adaptation of "Moby Dick" for U.s. Network, a gay Manhattanite living through the height of the AIDS epidemic in Christopher Ashley's "Jeffrey") and confronting it (a white supremacist leader in Jeremy Saulnier'south "Green Room," a pill-popping cable-news jockey in Jonathan Ames and Seth MacFarlane'southward Starz comedy "Edgeless 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 and then thrilled when the terminal thing we did for 'Ten-Men' was 'Logan,'" he says. "It was the best 'X-Men' feel we both had, considering we were the same characters but their earth had been blown apart." He adds, "'Side by side Generation' didn't end like that. In fact, our last movie, 'Nemesis,' was pretty weak."
Released in 2002, "Nemesis" lost money for Paramount. Simply J.J. Abrams' 2009 movie 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 and then equally 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. "Simply they talked about it in such an interesting way. And they talked for a long fourth dimension." Stewart told the producers no, thank you, and sent them on their fashion. Then he had an immediate alter 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-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'due south 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 devastation of the planet Romulus (every bit seen in Abrams' "Star Expedition"). When those two seemingly disparate strands of his life cantankerous, Picard returns to action, this time without the backing of a Starfleet whose moral center has shifted.
Roddenberry believed that in the time to come, man beings would advance to the point that they would, essentially, not have conflict with one another. Their biggest challenges would exist external.
Stewart, as well an exec producer on "Picard," insists, "We are remaining very faithful to Gene Roddenberry's notion of what the time to come might be like." But rigid adherence to that notion is clearly not what he'southward here for.
"In a mode, the earth of 'Next Generation' had been likewise perfect and too protected," he says. "Information technology was the Enterprise. Information technology 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?' Mayhap they're not as reliable and trustworthy as we all thought."
Existent-world parallels are not hard to identify. Information technology is one calendar week earlier the parliamentary election that will run across British prime minister and Brexit hardliner Boris Johnson'south Conservatives win a staggering victory over their Labour rivals. And Stewart is not feeling optimistic well-nigh the near time to come.
"I'm non sure which 1 of us is in the almost trouble," he says of Britain and the Usa. "I think it'due south really the U.K. I think we're f—ed, completely f—ed." He points to studies predicting decades-long economic harm inflicted past the land's looming withdrawal from the European Marriage. Of the U.S., he says, "At that place is a time limit to your f—ed state, which is four years away." He expresses hope that "the United states of america that has given us the Trump administration" can change, simply adds, "He volition probable 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 office as Cmdr. William Riker in "Picard" and directed two episodes of the new evidence's get-go season, believes that age has merely heightened Stewart'southward powers.
"Patrick has get sillier as he's gotten older," Frakes says. "His sense of humour 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 conviction in his work allows him, I think, to be confident in his personal life. And he's at ease. It'due south a great ease to be with him. Anybody who's in this business as an actor could expect to that career and say, 'That's a success.'"
In the week alee, Stewart will non merely perform "A Christmas Carol" for the first time in more than than a decade and a half, he'll besides entertain Chabon and Goldsman at his dwelling house 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 role.
"I've been doing some really interesting work for the last few years," Stewart says. He thinks back to 1987, when "The Side by side Generation" premiered. "There was not a corner of my life, public, individual, that wasn't touched by this sudden transformation. And I and then enjoyed it. 'X-Men,' 'Star Trek' and and so, having come back eighteen months ago to exercise 'Picard,' I've just …"
He pauses and places a hand on the blackness binder. "God, this is going to be difficult to say. It's wonderful work, only it'southward non enough. The challenge is great, but I desire something bigger."
Source: https://variety.com/2020/tv/features/patrick-stewart-star-trek-picard-cbs-all-access-1203459573/
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