[COLUMN] Patrick Stewart Was Many Things - But He Was Also Jean-Luc Picard | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Sir Patrick Stewart passed away earlier this week. It is a tremendous loss. It is no exaggeration to state that Stewart was one of the best and defining actors of his generation.

Stewart had a long and varied career. He was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Society. His first television role was playing a fireman on an early episode of Coronation Street. To British viewers, Stewart made an impression in a number of small but notable roles, such as the Soviet spymaster Karla in the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People and as the ambitious Sejanus in I, Claudius.

Stewart also had a remarkable career in American film and television. He had a small but memorable role in David Lynch’s Dune. He played Professor Charles Xavier for decades, and will be appearing in Avengers: Doomsday later this year. He had a long and fruitful comedic partnership with Seth McFarlane, collaborating with him on Family Guy, Ted, Blunt Talk and as a recurring guest star on the animated sitcom American Dad.

However, there is one role that towers above all others in Stewart’s impressive filmography. For the better part of four decades, from the launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987 to the wrap on Star Trek: Picard in 2023, Patrick Stewart played Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise. He played the role across more than two hundred episodes of television and four feature films, not to mention cameos and parodies.

That’s a lot for an actor to carry, to be tethered so completely to an iconic character in the popular consciousness. Stewart, however, had made his peace with it. “I know that if it were all to end this evening – everything – I would be largely known for my work on Star Trek,” he told William Shatner in the documentary The Captains. “I would be Captain Picard. Not Macbeth, not King Lear, not Shakespeare, not any of those things but Captain Picard. And I am absolutely fine with that.”

It is a remarkable thing to play a character like that, not only over such a long stretch of time, but across such a large volume of material. Stewart played Picard for the better part of two hundred hours of film and television, and his work was a staple of syndicated television viewing for decades. They never really went away. Even on streaming services like Netflix, the Star Trek shows found a large audience, with four Next Generation episodes among the most-streamed episodes.

Something interesting inevitably happens with that sort of actor in that sort of role. The actor and the character eventually start to blur and merge. Jean-Luc Picard becomes such a large part of Patrick Stewart’s life and Patrick Stewart spends so much time inhabiting Jean-Luc Picard that the character gets drawn towards Stewart’s strengths as a performer and Stewart’s interests begin to shape and define Picard as a character.

The production team originally wanted Yaphet Kotto to play the character, and it seems likely that would have been a very different interpretation from what Picard eventually became. Even at the outset, there was an incongruity baked into the character. Stewart was a British actor from Yorkshire, while – as the name implies – Picard was a Frenchman whose family owned vineyards in La Barre. Even in the cosmopolitan 24th century, with the occasional “merde” thrown in, it didn’t add up.

However, as the show went on, it began to lean into Stewart’s Shakespearean background. He would quote Hamlet to the omnipotent Q (John de Lancie). He would cite poetry to Lwaxanna Troi (Majel Barrett Roddenberry). It is very telling that, in the wake of his passing, fans have been sharing inspirational quotes and monologues from Stewart as Picard, whether in classic episodes like “The Measure of a Man” or in less-than-classic episodes like “Peak Performance.”

Part of this push to make Picard more Shakespearean also made him more human. Picard was allowed to develop flaws and contradictions over the course of the show. In particular, a sense of pride and ego. In the episode “Time Squared”, for example, Picard is confronted with a time-displaced version of himself from the future, a version that survived the destruction of his ship and the death of his crew.

Picard struggles existentially with the question of why he would leave his command and his colleagues to die. The future self insists that he left the ship to lure away the threat that would otherwise destroy the vessel, but Picard seems unconvinced. In an impressively existential ending, “Time Squared” finds Picard confronting – and murdering – this future version of himself, because he is so incapable of acknowledging any flawed or failed facet of himself.

There is a sense that some of this bled over from Stewart into the character. Ian McKellen would advise him not to take the role, insisting he has “too much important theater work to do” and that it would be a crime to “throw that away to do television.” Stewart recalls taking the role primarily because his agent assured him it would last “six months, no more.” Explaining Stewart’s work ethic, Jonathan Frakes explained Stewart took pride in being one of the best actors in the world.

By his own admission, in the early days of The Next Generation, Stewart could be “a severe bastard.” He often tells a story from the first season in which he chided the cast for goofing around, telling them “we’re not here to have fun.” Stewart would inevitably loosen up. Later in his career, he would talk about the pride that he took in being the most fun person on any given set. Still, it feels like this patrician sensibility bled into the characterization of Picard.

This is part of the power of “The Best of Both Worlds”, the famous third-season cliffhanger in which Picard was assimilated by the Borg, his knowledge harvested and his body used as a spokesperson for the alien invaders. Picard is inevitably rescued and recovered, but the events leave their mark on him, informing later episodes like “Family”, “I, Borg” and the feature film First Contact. A large part of this is the shame and humiliation that he feels that he could have been used in such a way.

“They took everything I was,” he confesses later to his brother Robert (Jeremy Kemp). “They used me to kill and to destroy, and I couldn't stop them. I should have been able to stop them! I tried. I tried so hard, but I wasn't strong enough. I wasn't good enough. I should have been able to stop them.” Robert is sympathetic. “So, my brother is a human being after all,” he replies. “This is going to be with you a long time, Jean-Luc. A long time. You have to learn to live with it.”

Stewart shaped and defined the role of Picard. He would famously tell young writer Ronald D. Moore that he felt Picard didn’t get to do enough “shooting and screwing” (or “fucking and fighting”) on the series, leading to episodes like Picard’s trip to the sex planet Risa in “Captain’s Holiday” or the Die Hard riff in “Starship Mine.” Tellingly, the feature films – most notably First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis – put a strong emphasis on Picard as an extremely unlikely action hero, driven by Stewart.

There is some pushback in fandom against this evolution of Picard, treating it as a betrayal of the character to have him riding dune buggies and flying fighter shuttles. In truth, it is an evolution like any other character development. It is the inevitable outcome of having a character like this tied to an actor for so long a period. Patrick Stewart was Jean-Luc Picard, and Jean-Luc Picard was Patrick Stewart. It was a performance, but it was also an expression of the man underneath it all.

“As the seven seasons of TNG went by, the distinction between Jean-Luc Picard and Patrick Stewart became thinner and thinner, until it was impossible for me to know where he left off and I began,” Stewart would confess to The Guardian decades later. “So much of what I believed and felt went into that show.” This is not only fair, but also inevitable. Stewart himself changed and grew over the decades that he was playing Picard. Why wouldn’t Picard also change?

Picard also became a vehicle for Stewart’s more personal anxieties. In particular, as The Next Generation went on, Picard was defined as a man who had chosen his career and his vocation over the possibility of raising a family. In Generations, he mourns the possibility that the Picard family line ends with him. At various points, including in the final seasons of The Next Generation and Picard, the character is confronted with a possible son or heir.

In “The Inner Light”, Picard is granted a vision of an alternate life in which he settled down and started a family, having children. In a Reddit ask-me-anything, Stewart described “The Inner Life” as his favorite episode of the show, not only for what was on screen, but what happened behind the scenes. His imaginary son was played by Stewart’s real-life son, Daniel. Stewart would work with Daniel at multiple points in his career, in the movie Death Train and show Blunt Talk. As with Picard, Stewart’s work was in some ways his life.

However, off-screen, Stewart was never as close to his older children as he would have liked. “My relationship with them is practically non-existent,” Stewart confessed to The Irish Independent. “I always put my acting work first, before my family.” Stewart would spend years trying to find and build a family. He was married three times. There is a sense of this carrying over into the way that Picard developed, a man who slowly embraced his work colleagues as his extended family.

And this carried over into the revival of Picard. In particular, the first season of Picard was very obviously and very heavily driven by Stewart’s own anxieties about the state of the modern world, an old man watching the future promised by The Next Generation slip out of reach in an era of resurgent nationalism and xenophobia. Stewart’s anxieties became Picard’s anxieties. In particular, that show’s vision of a floundering Federation was shaped by Stewart’s reaction to Brexit.

“The European Union always made me feel, well, we are heading towards our own Federation of Planets somewhere down the line that will come about,” he told NPR. “And I am angry, disappointed and embarrassed by our decision to leave the Union.” Like Picard, Stewart became a champion of progressive ideals. He spoke out in favor of marriage equality and against Brexit. Like the character that he played, Stewart was an advocate for a better and more equitable world.

Even in the later seasons of Picard, the boundaries between Stewart and the character continued to collapse. Stewart has spoken remarkably openly and candidly about his troubled childhood, including the domestic violence that his mother experienced at the hands of his father. This became a major story thread in the second season of Picard, in which the character is haunted by memories of his father Maurice (James Callis) locking his mother Ygrette (Madeline Wise) away in a cupboard.

The ultimately handling and resolution of this subplot was less than ideal, clumsy and silly in the ways that Picard – particularly in its later seasons – was often clumsy and silly. However, it did feel like a conversation between Patrick Stewart and his most iconic and beloved character, an attempt for Stewart to use Picard, as he often had over the years, to try to make sense of himself, to perhaps offer a better and happier take on his own formative trauma.

In some ways, this is the luxury of playing a character like this over such an extended period. This union of actor and character is not a bug, but a feature. Stewart leaves behind a character who feels like more than just a random role. He leaves behind a character that feels like an expression of himself, a statement about who he was that will endure and remain. It’s impossible to look at Picard and not see Stewart, and there is something deeply heartening in that, to know that Stewart will always be with us, in all these complicated ways, even through this prism.

Patrick Stewart was so many things. He was an actor, an advocate, seemingly a wonderful person. He was a joy to watch on screen, to listen to on chat shows and even to read in his articles and biographies. He was one of the greatest performers of his generation and, by all accounts, a delight to be around. He was also Jean-Luc Picard, and Jean-Luc Picard was him. Stewart has left such an impressive legacy behind him, and Picard is a particularly impressive monument.