Patrick Stewart

Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Patrick Stewart, who stars in the hotly anticipated summer franchise film X-Men: The Last Stand, was perhaps the forerunner of an odd trend that has occurred recently: the classically trained actor who also takes on very mainstream sci-fi and fantasy roles. There's Alfred Molina, the bad guy in Spider-Man 2 who was first in Royal National Theater productions. The late Richard Harris began his career on stage and ended it with Harry Potter. And, of course, there's Stewart's X-Men co-star and frequent Shakespeare performer Ian McKellen, who plays the villainous Magneto and also has Gandalf to his credit.

Stewart got the jump on all of them. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. But in 1987, he signed on to play Captain Picard in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. "I took the job on the basis that it wouldn't be more than one season because I had other things to do," Stewart reminisces. The show would last seven seasons and survive through four movies. "It changed my life in every possible way. I enjoyed the work, mostly immensely; I learned so much from it. It united me with a group of people who I came to respect and admire, it gave me international reputation as an actor' There are people I just happen to meet in the street, or they're members of Congress, or they're senior members of the armed services, or British politicians, or whatever, who confessed themselves to be absolutely addicted to watching The Next Generation. It's always delightful to discover that."

Members of Congress' "I swore not to name names," he says.

Overall the Star Trek years were more than worthwhile. "I'm proud of everything that we achieved during that time -- of entertainment, storytelling, discussion of all kinds of important social issues, and the quality of the work that we did."

Those same achievements may be what drew Stewart to the X-Men films in the first place, aside from the fact that his signature baldness made him a perfect candidate for Professor Charles Xavier.

"In the case of the X-Men' I think the central metaphor is the mutant issue. There is something here that sets people apart, which makes them different, not of the norm, outside the convention," says Stewart. The X-Men films have largely been about mutants fighting not just each other but also the world's prejudices, and have been seen as allegories to everything from race to homosexuality issues. It's really about anyone considered different -- at all. "Those whose lives or whose bodies or personalities are in some way outside what is considered to be the norm," sums up Stewart in his typically elegant fashion.

The link between Shakespeare's oeuvre and Stewart's line of science fiction work may have a simpler explanation, however. "I have all my life been drawn to ensemble work," Stewart says. "It began very soon after I left drama school. I didn't look to do television, I went to join companies. Regional theater. And luckily in those days, unlike now, when I think there's only one permanent regional theater company in the UK, then there were 40 or 50. And I stayed, because I liked the sense of continuity, the intimacy that came with being with people day in day out, whom you got to know and whom you came to trust."

He found a similar sense of continuity with the X-Men films. "To fly into Vancouver last July, and in the next 48 hours, to encounter all those people that I've spent those working hours with on the first two movies, whether they were producers, or crew, or the actors, and so forth, feel very good to me."

In this case, however, there was a major monkey wrench. X-Men franchise director Bryan Singer opted out of X3 to instead direct Superman Returns. Brought on board was Brett Ratner, the director of the Rush Hour films as well as the far more impressive thriller, Red Dragon.

"We had a new director, the most important person on the project, and Brett was brilliant in the way that he dealt with the situation. And I don't mean to imply in any way that this was not genuine, but one of the very first things he said to me was, 'I got to tell you, I am a huge fan of Bryan Singer, and the work that he did on X-Men, and the work that you guys achieved on the first two films is extraordinary, and I just hope that I can build on that,' and well, that's just a lovely way to begin these things. It could've gone very differently. I've experienced it, like, 'Okay, what's happened in the past, that's in the past, we're starting again.' Oh my, that's so hard to do." (Referencing the aweful experience with director Stuart Baird on Star Trek: Nemesis is my guess.)

But was Bryan Singer's absence still felt'

"Yes it was felt; at the beginning it felt a little strange. Bryan had stamped such a tone and personality on these movies. And is himself a person of distinctive characteristics' The most important thing, and this actually applies to Bryan too, though they show it in different ways, they both love being movie directors. They love shooting movies, walking onto the set in the morning. And Brett's characteristic is probably more boisterous, more energetic, for instance, Brett tended to spend more time actually on the set, than in Video Village, in front of the monitors, than Bryan did. I think simply because he gets such a kick out of being around actors working, cinematographers, camera operators, electricians, grips; he is so excited by that world, and that's very infectious, it's great being around people who love what they do."

While Stewart answers the X-Men and Star Trek questions with a quiet thoughtfulness that transcends mere spin, he gets downright excited talking about the theater. When asked how he originally became interested, he mentions he's trying to put together a one-man show about his life. "What happened was that an English teacher when I was twelve years old dished out copies of Merchant of Venice, and said, 'Act One, Scene Two, Stewart, you're Shylock. Read it.' And I started reading it, and he said, 'No, no, no, Stewart, not to yourself, this is a play it's not a poem, read it out loud.' And it just took off from there."

He also speaks enthusiastically about the new Royal Shakespeare Company season he is involved in.

"Michael Boyd, the relatively new artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has created this season, and why nobody else has done it before I can't imagine. The RSC are presenting all 37 of Shakespeare's plays within a 12-month framework... So if you cared to, in this 12-month period, you could see onstage every single play that Shakespeare wrote' It's the biggest and most exciting artistic project in the UK at this time. And my production launched it a few weeks ago with Antony and Cleopatra, and quite appropriately, it will close with Ian McKellen as King Lear."

With that, Stewart has gracefully found a way to round the conversation back to the topic at hand -- X-Men. "As I get older, I care more and more about who I spend my time with," he says. "With this group [the cast], and now Brett, of course. Now Brett is inextricably intertwined with what is X-Men. I cannot think of a pleasanter way of spending my days."