Patrick Stewart: 9 Essential Roles

Patrick Stewart wasn’t a big Star Trek devotee — or even a real science fiction aficionado — when he was cast as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. “Gosh, no!” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “I have no enthusiasm for it whatsoever.” But after some initial hesitation, fans found incredible enthusiasm for Stewart after seeing the classically-trained Shakespeare actor battle the Romulans, find common cause with the Klingons, and even engage in a flirty will they/won’t they with chief medical officer Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden.) And in the two-part “Best of Both Worlds” episode, Picard was transformed by the Borg into the evil Locutus. ““Resistance is futile,” he said, in one of the most famous moments in Star Trek history. “Your life, as it has been is over.” A role like this could have easily typecast Stewart for life, which was the fate for many of the original Star Trek actors. But Stewart was such a titanic talent that it only elevated him to new career heights, and he’d even return to it for the late-career franchise highlight Picard. —Andy Greene

Patrick Stewart played many kings throughout his seven decades on the stage and screen — and there’s something delightful about the Sherwood Forest adventure parody ending with Stewart’s swaggering, armor-clad appearance on screen. Thieves, men in tights, and his own brother John begin kneeling in respect. “Throw him in the Tower of London!” he shouts with a smirk, as the peasants drag John away. “Make him part of the tour!” It’s the film’s equivalent of signaling that the adults are back in the room, placing Stewart where people will always remember him — on stage with a crown. —CT Jones

Stewart once found himself in a director’s office, pitching himself for a role he desperately wanted, when he stopped cold with a rhetorical question: “Why would I want Captain Picard in my movie?” This was the reason, Sir Patrick later admitted, that he initially said no when he was asked to play Charles Xavier, head of the School for Gifted Mutants. “I already had one glorious albatross around my neck,” he declared. “I don’t need two.” After having lunch with Bryan Singer, however, he eventually agreed to play Professor X — and helped change superhero movies forever. Next to his iconic Star Trek role, Charles Xavier was arguably his best-known part, conveying a sense of authority and offering a moral alternative to Magneto (played by Ian McKellen), his longtime Homo superior frenemy. Stewart would end up playing the wheelchair-bound father figure of Marvel’s mutant team in no less than nine times, including one last appearance as Xavier in the upcoming MCU battle-royale epic Avengers: Doomsday. —David Fear

“I love my life,” Stewart’s ballet instructor says. “I regret my life. The lines eventually blur.” His character Tobi is a legendary choreographer who now teaches at Julliard; when asked to sit for an interview with a woman (Carla Gugino) working on her thesis paper and her husband (Matthew Lilliard), he’s happy to wax poetic about his artistic legacy. Then Tobi begins to suspect there’s a secondary agenda behind this encounter, one which will force him to confront a past he’d rather leave in the rearview mirror. Stephen Belber’s underrated screen adaptation of his own play gives Sir Patrick a stage on which to rage, and the actor makes the most of it. You can’t imagine anyone giving the work’s ending the sort of emotional wallop that Stewart delivers — a moment in which someone who’s been dancing as fast as they can from remorseful memories is finally forced to face the music. —D.F.

If there was a special Emmy Award for Best Battle With an Airport Toilet in a TV Comedy, Stewart would have easily nabbed it courtesy of this standout sequence from Jonathan Ames’ cracked sitcom. Even without this choice bit of restroom-related slapstick, this chance for Sir Patrick to indulge his inner cringe-comic crank would be memorable for any number of other moments in which his British broadcaster Walter Blunt blunders his way through the brave new world of anything-goes cable news. The show could be crass at times — Family Guy‘s Seth MacFarlane was the executive producer — but this two-season dispatch from the premium-cable fringe has a cult following, and Stewart’s exquisite take on a TV antihero is a big reason why. —D.F.

The good news is that, after one of their shows is abruptly cancelled, the up-and-coming punk band the Ain’t Rights manages to secure a last-minute substitute gig and this keep their tour going. The bad news is it’s at a Neo-Nazi club in the rural outskirts of Oregon — and because one of the group’s members have witnessed a murder, they’re trapped inside the joint, with every racist skinhead baying for blood outside the green room’s door. Jeremy Saulnier’s white-knuckle thriller handed Stewart one hell of a villainous role in Darcy Banker, an elderly white supremacist who fancies himself an intellectual yet certainly isn’t above killing these inconvenient interlopers. When the actor read the script, he noted that it “scared the shit out of me” and immediately poured himself a large Scotch to calm his nerves. Then he quickly proceeded to say yes, knowing that it if unnerved him that much on the page, it had a chance to make quite an impact on screen. “Darcy is a bad guy — a really bad guy,” Stewart later said. “And I have to be honest and say it was that aspect that seduced me.” —D.F.

There’s an entire other list that could —and should — cover Sir Patrick’s prolific stage work, which ran the gamut from Shakespeare’s Scottish play to Waiting for Godot to his legendary one-man version of A Christmas Carol. For many of us who weren’t able to catch him on Broadway or London’s West End, however, this filmed version of Harold Pinter’s play about a night of drinking that takes a menacing turn — which once again paired Stewart with his longtime friend and fellow thespian Ian McKellen — was one of the few chances to see him flex his theatrical muscles. And Hirst, a man of means who brings home a dissolute poet who he may or may not have met before, is indeed one hell of a role for Stewart, especially as his memory becomes spotty under the fog of booze and possible madness. McKellen’s character may get to describe the imagined lost world of the play’s title, “which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older… but which remains forever, icy and silent.” Sir Patrick is the one who gets the last laugh and the last line, however: “I’ll drink to that!” —D.F.

Stewart had played Marvel’s Professor X a number of times (see: the X-Men blurb above). But his turn as an alt-universe Charles Xavier, now an old man confused and in pain, bombarded with fractured memories of the past, is so unique that it deserves its own entry. In fact, it feels odd to even call writer-director James Mangold’s take on the “Old Man Logan” comics storyline an X-Men film, because the movie operates less like a formulaic blockbuster and more like a grounded retrospective on the end of an era. And it wouldn’t work without Stewart, a physical representation of a lost lifetime bound to his wheels and a small, abandoned home. Stewart will always be one of the defining faces of cinema’s superhero genre. It’s only fitting he helped change the bounds of what that could look like.  —C.T.J.

Sure, Stewart’s onscreen sparring partner Ian McKellen had brought Tolkien’s sagely Gandalf to life. But Sir Patrick proved to be no slouch in the sorcery department by taking on the O.G. of the wizardry world: Merlin. Stewart played the adult version of the resident spellcaster in King Arthur’s court (Angus Imrie is the younger version — long story) in this Y.A. gem about a kid who stumbles across a sword in a construction site. It just so happens to be Excalibur, which brings forth both the wizard and a host of potentially world-ending problems. Every time Merlin switches to his older form, we get the chance to watch Stewart ham it up in a wild hairdo and a ratty Led Zeppelin concert t-shirt. All this, plus he gets a poignant farewell scene. Magic, indeed. —D.F.

Watching one of England’s greatest national treasures voice a decapitated swine’s head might seem like a hard sell, but there’s nothing more quintessentially Patrick Stewart than his work in this showbiz satire. After all, the late actor had a dedicated track record of supporting actors who were making big, creative leaps — and he loved a good laugh. Created and starring Riz Ahmed, Bait follows struggling actor Shah Latif whose life goes through a downward spiral when he’s rumored to be the next James Bond. When a pig’s head is sent to Latif’s family as a clear anti-Muslim threat, Shah’s mental state wavers even further when he starts to hear it speak to him in Stewart’s slow, distinct, timbre. To say that Stewart’s readings add an extra cheeky layer to the show’s existing critiques of long-held British establishments would be an understatement. “It was another moment of grace and incredible luck and generosity of the universe… that he said yes,” Ahmed said. “I cherish that man.”  —C.T.J.