BRIGER: So you said you were safer and you liked not having to be Patrick Stewart, so was acting an escape from your home, from your family life, then? You know, I'd had friends who had taken the plus and gone to grammar school, you know, when - friends I'd had when I was 8, 9, I was cut off from them because I I wasn't scholarly.
I wasn't academic, but finding that people wanted to have me in their plays and productions and so forth. And we did quite a lot of acting in the school. Where I grew up, you were not thought weird if you were a performer, not remotely. On the other hand, it was actually applauded and loved. So to sing, to play an instrument, to act a scene, to recite a poem - these things were respected.
And my memory of Christmas at home is of, oh, almost every member of my family performing something. So that wasn't strange, being an actor. I grew up in a town called Mirfield, which had a population of 9, people. And in that town, there were 11 fully functioning amateur dramatic groups. Now, many of them would only have done one production a year, and that might have been a pantomime, a Christmas show, you know. But that's how comfortable everybody was with being onstage and seeing a friend or a family member onstage.
So was there a moment that you remember where you were acting and you thought that you perhaps had some skill and that maybe you could do this as a career? I'll just summarize, but you were 15, and you were working in a local paper, and you were spending too much of your time in amateur productions. And in fact, you were committing the journalistic sin of making up things in your reports.
Yes, that's true. Sometimes I would just get someone to cover for me if I had a rehearsal and there was a council meeting or something I had to attend, or I would have a contact there and I would phone him afterwards and he would give me all the stuff, or the final alternative was that I just made it up.
And I didn't get really found out until one night, when I was supposed to be at a council meeting, a huge fire broke out. Where I lived, it was heavy woolen industry. It was weaving, big mills, weaving mills. And the editor and the subeditor called each other, and they said, we've got to get somebody out there; there's a huge blaze. And the subeditor said, no, no, no, Patrick's next door in the council meeting. He'll be right there.
And the next morning, I was called into the editor's office and given an ultimatum. So there was - it sounds like there, like, a year period where you were paying your dues, probably in amateur and semiprofessional roles, right? And, you know, class has so much influence in England. Is it as influential in the theater? Like, were you looked down upon at the Royal Shakespeare Company from coming from the working class?
Actors like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay were already leading star actors, and they came from working-class backgrounds.
I mean, both of them had slight accents, you know, and both of them were brilliant. What I did feel, to a certain extent, was that it was hard for me to play very sophisticated upper-class or upper-middle-class people because I used to find the accent kind of difficult. In fact, it wasn't just an accent; I spoke in dialect. So when my acting teacher, who I luckily met - Ruth Wynn Owen - when I was 13, when she said to me, Patrick, if you really want to, you know, play everything onstage, you're going to have to lose that accent - not all the time, but you're going to have to be able to lose it.
That no longer applies. I think, if anything, the BBC now looks for people who have accents. But I used different words. I mean, I will give you a very quick instance. If I go to a friend's house - if I went to a friend's house to ask him if he was coming out to play, I would say, at a laikin' aht, ph. At a laikin' aht. At a - art thou. Laikin' - which is at least a 16th-century word for playing - aht, out. Are you coming out to play? So it was quite a long journey for me to get away from that.
And for a couple of years, my life was split. Weekends when I worked with dear Ruth Wynn Owen, my acting teacher, who had a beautiful accent and a beautiful voice, I would attempt to speak RP.
And sometimes I would get them mixed up and, oh, did that get me in trouble with my friends. And in this scene, Macbeth has just found out that his wife has died. And you give this very famous soliloquy known as Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. So I'd just like to hear that. STEWART: As Macbeth Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death, out, out brief candle, life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. So I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what choices you made in doing that soliloquy. I loved that role. I played it for exactly a year, and I did no other work for those days, only "Macbeth.
It affected me very badly when I was on Broadway. I don't think it showed in my performance. I used to go home and get drunk every night and then sleep in the morning and then get ready. The best part of the day for me was 6 o'clock when I thought two hours from now I'm going to be walking on stage playing this great role because it is a fantastic role.
But how did I make an interpretation of it? Well, one day before we'd started rehearsing, I was somewhere in London on the street and who should I encounter but somebody who at the time I didn't know that well, Sir Ian McKellen. And he said to me, hey, is it true what I've heard, that you're going to be playing Macbeth? Now, Ian had done a production of "Macbeth" with Judi Dench, with Dame Judi Dench, which had been one of the most remarkable Shakespearean performances I had ever seen.
And I said, well, yes, it is. And he said, can I just give you one little word of advice? And I said, oh, please, as much as you like. He said that, you know, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, the most important word is and. And God bless him. I got it instantly. It's not tomorrow and tomorrow but tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And it was such a typical Ian McKellen interpretation of a line. And, you know, that spread all the way through the performance for me.
Bless him. Is that Now, Ian has a wonderful education. Ian is a Cambridge graduate. And actually he was well-known as an actor before he even left Cambridge.
And he does say - because we have become very, very close friends. I love him very dearly. He believes that I have a real hang up about my education. And he said to me, it's time you let it go. It doesn't matter that you didn't go to university. But, you know, I always think - this - because he came from a working-class background like me. But he had the brain to get a scholarship to Cambridge, and I'm so envious of that.
And if you're just joining us, my guest is Patrick Stewart, who is the star of the new show "Star Trek: Picard. What did you - what do you mean by that? And I was told about it by my - the director of my acting school. And towards the end of my two years there, he called me into his office and gave me a pretty tough talking to. But the last thing he said to me was, Patrick, you will never achieve success by insuring against failure.
And I thought I knew what he meant, but I didn't, not for years and years and years. And I learned that you have to take risks.
You have to be brave. You have to step into the unknown. You have to jump off the edge of the cliff. All of those things are required of actors. Once I'd finally understood that, I knew what direction I had to go in.
And there were a few opportunities where you played Jean-Luc Picard as an older man. I was just wondering what it's like to play him now as an older man yourself? I used to learn lines so easily. Now when we're shooting the series, I have the week's work laid out in front of me. And then I'm really familiar with Wednesday and quite familiar with Thursday and Friday so that each day, I will be on top of what I have to do insofar as just learning the lines goes.
And I stick with that. Other than that, one of the nice things about being 79 and playing a man who's a couple of years older is I don't have to act it. I just - I'm I'm 80 in a month's time. So I mean, no one can accuse me of being a fake year-old because it's what I am. And my, you know - I forget that I've said things. And I forget people's names and telephone numbers and all of that.
My wife is blessedly patient with me. I mean, you in your past, you've had the opportunity to play older men. Looking back at those performances as - when you were a younger man but portraying an older man, what do you think you got right or didn't get right?
Or what are you surprised about now, being a year-old, that you wouldn't have been able to incorporate into your roles back then? I'm braver than I was when I was I am not averse to risk-taking. And I don't judge myself. Ah, Patrick, that's not good enough.
That's not good enough. You could've done that differently. You could've done it better. That gets in the way of spontaneity and real feeling coming into something. I really enjoyed speaking with you.
I've been really enjoying seeing you on television. And I'm looking forward to Season 2. And it's just been a real delight to speak with you. So thank you so much. It's been renewed for a second season. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer of digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. And Stewart wanted to show that Picard had changed too. Picard always had a rare combination of erudition and earnestness.
He was someone who cared. How noble in reason. Picard never leaves anything half-finished. That was not to be the case.
Talking to IndieWire in early May from his home in Los Angeles, Stewart expressed how important he felt it was to reflect not only the passage of time in the 24th Century setting of the franchise but also how much has changed in our own world in the 18 years since we last saw Picard onscreen. Stewart and Picard seem closer to merging than ever. By Daniel Holloway. Executive Editor, TV. The year-old actor leans in and clasps his hands when recounting his upbringing in the North of England.
He stands and paces when a subject such as 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. The run: just two nights at a seat theater on 54th Street. I could have found other things to do that were not so enormous as this.
But I chose it. Sixteen years have passed, and the world is a different place from when I last did it. It sure is. And Stewart believes that makes the piece more timely than ever. His motivations — to challenge himself, to speak to injustice, to give himself the sense of calm in anxious 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 one of the most beloved actors alive: Picard.
On Jan. 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. He fights for the things he believes in. Nothing is really safe. Nothing is really secure. Science fiction — a genre Stewart had little use 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 use it thusly at a time when the compassion of the U. Stewart grew up poor. The home had no heat aside from an open fireplace, and no hot water. The toilet was separate from the house. He would sit there, reading by candlelight — first American authors, such as Hemingway. Later, Russians.
And then Shakespeare. His mother was a weaver who took social pleasure from her work despite the difficult conditions. He was also a war hero. In , Stewart appeared on the U. In recent years, Stewart has worked with Amnesty International on issues of domestic violence against women and with a U. After the war, an officer with connections in London put the elder Stewart up for the position of second doorman at The Dorchester in London.
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