Patrick Stewart Loves Shakespeare, Once Lectured The Star Trek Cast

It's no secret that everybody's favorite bald British space explorer, Patrick Stewart, is getting rave reviews for his performance in director Rupert Goold’s Macbeth, which opened in the UK last summer and hits New York next month.

The New York Times talked to Stewart recently about the play, his love for Shakespeare and, of course, his encounters with Klingons, androids and other worlds as captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Most Stewart fans -- especially those who've seen this -- might find it hard to believe that he was once the Enterprise crew's biggest wet blanket, or that he used to be afraid to take risks as an actor. Read on for a recap of the NYT piece. Read more ...

NYT Photo Gallery of Stewart's Theater Work


Stewart’s First Impressions of Star Trek:

Discovered by a “Star Trek” producer who saw him speaking at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Stewart balked at the standard contract committing him for six years. But he calmed down when “everybody told me it would be a flop,” he related. “A friend of mine said, ‘Get a suntan, make some money, go home.’ ” …

All he knew about “Star Trek” had been gleaned from registering that his two children occasionally watched a show on television featuring “guys in yellow and blue T-shirts,” he said. “Things like ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ never meant anything to me. I didn’t know what sitting in that chair meant, how that role resonated for a large number of Americans.”

His First Year on the Trek Set:

On set he had difficulty fitting in and took offense at the way he felt his castmates tended to horse around. So he called a meeting and “lectured them about having to be more serious,” he said …

That did not go over very well. “It was really awful, being dressed down by the captain,” said Mr. (Brent) Spiner, who played Data, the android, and is still close to Mr. Stewart. “We really thought, ‘Well, please, get over it … In the beginning he approached it as you would a serious Shakespeare role. It was serious work … By the end of the first year we’d broken him down, and he became perhaps the silliest of us all.”

Looking Back on Trek and Galaxy Quest:

Mr. Stewart spoke happily, even sentimentally, about his Enterprise-commanding days, which left him with a castful of close friends and an unexpected appreciation for the importance of “Star Trek” in American culture. He found the 1999 film “Galaxy Quest,’’ a satire that gently mocks the actors and fans of a “Star Trek”-like series, hilarious, but also moving, he said, in its recognition that “there was something profoundly serious and good” about the series."

Why Shakespeare, Why Now?

He came back to Britain and to full-time (for now) Shakespeare, he said, because he was homesick and fretting about lost time and missed opportunities. “Roles were passing me by, and I wanted to do more,” he said …

“I used to recite Shakespeare from memory,” he said. “I just learned all these big speeches. That’s what’s so interesting about playing Macbeth this year, because I’ve known these speeches all my life.”

Taking Risks as an Actor:

“I had a certain fear of exposing myself too much in my work for a long time,” he said. “A lot of what performing to me had been was elaborate, and at times quite clever, concealment. Someone once said of acting that it is ‘telling beautiful lies,’ and well, it became just no longer satisfactory to work that way.” …

Depicting the out-of-control fury so essential for the meatiest Shakespearean parts was particularly difficult, Mr. Stewart said, because his father was a military man with a prodigious, terrifying temper. “I was absolutely determined that it would never play any part in my life at all,” he said …

Later, he realized “that you can have those feelings and still be safe, and everybody else will be safe too.”

His Love For and Theories About Shakespeare

“I have this theory that these roles, the really great roles — there are elements of them in all of us. And that is part of the greatness of this dramatist, that he taps into something which is entirely human. You feel him reaching out his hand and saying to you as an actor, ‘Come on, it’s easier than you think.’ ” …

Mr. Stewart described an experience he had recently, as he walked alone before dusk near his rural village in Oxfordshire. “Suddenly I had this urge to speak the role, and there’s nobody about,” he said. “So I started at the top of the play, with ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen,’ and I said the whole role through aloud, just to refresh my memory. It was a long walk. … “But it hit me before I said the lines ‘Light thickens, and the crow/Makes wing to the rooky wood’ — That’s exactly how it was,” he continued. “And I thought: This is wonderful. Every night in New York when I come to that part, I’ll remember where I was, on this lonely road with bare fields on either side, and there’s a mist hanging over the field, and indeed there are crows.”

On Coming to New York:

He said he was looking forward to the exuberance of New York. “It would irritate my father so much — because he was a military man, and both my brothers did military service, and I didn’t — that I walk around New York and I hear, ‘Hey, Captain, how are you?’ ” he said.