entertainment
“I Don’t Know Where The Years Have
Gone”
From stage to screen, from Shakespeare to Star Trek, Patrick Stewart has long been one of Britain’s most respected actors. But his latest role might just raise a few eyebrows… By TO M BROWNE
PHOTO: Robert Ascroft/CPi Syndication
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“ I D O N ’ T K N O W W H E R E T H E YE A R S H AV E G O NE ”
Reader’s Digest
“I settled down one evening
at 8pm with the script, and on page 40 I got up and checked that all the doors and windows in my house were locked,” says Patrick Stewart, chuckling at the memory. “My house in Oxfordshire is quite isolated, so I put the lights on and turned on the perimeter security system. I checked that the cameras were actually working. Then I poured myself a large glass of Scotch.” Anyone who’s seen Patrick’s new film Green Room will be unsurprised by this reaction. A grim, violent and frankly terrifying thriller set in a confined location, it’s the kind of film that has you looking over your shoulder a long time after it ends. In this way, it’s similar in tone to Deliverance, a classic horror movie from the Seventies about an ill-fated trip into the wilderness. Patrick nods when I make the comparison. “Yes, Deliverance is the movie I quote all the time—I’ve been doing so since I was on set. There’s a growing sense that something really bad is going to happen. You’re dealing with people who won’t be interested in sitting down, having a chat over a cup of coffee and working things out.” If this is hard to reconcile with the Patrick Stewart we’re used to seeing as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek or Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men films, then it’s even harder 24
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Patrick Stewart as Darcey Banker in Green Room, along with his cohorts
when you meet him face to face. Chatty, lively, funny and downright charming, he’s the kind of man who instantly puts you at ease. Somewhat different, then, from the character he plays in Green Room—Darcey Banker, the leader of a white-supremacist group, whose reaction to a punk-rock band that threatens to derail his illicit
plans is less than reassuring. So what’s a nice guy like Patrick doing in a film like this? “In the last few years, my main pursuit has been diversity,” he replies, after a thoughtful pause. “I have Picard and Xavier on either shoulder, and they’ve had such an enormous impact on my life. Often there’s a
misconception that these characters are who Patrick Stewart is. It’s been a blessing and curse.” It’s a blessing in the sense that you can confound people’s expectations by playing completely against type, I suggest. There’s evidence of that in another recent project: Blunt Talk, an edgy TV comedy series produced 05•2016
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Patrick embracing his outrageous side in TV comedy Blunt Talk
the opportunities afforded him by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the rich pleasures of the British stage. “I never had ambitions towards film and TV,” he confesses, “even though film had been my obsession when I was a child. The theatre was where I wanted to be, in the best possible circumstances—the best actors, the best directors and the best material. I found that with the RSC. I remember, after I’d been there five or six years, an actor saying, ‘You know, you ought to get out and do something else. There’s all kinds of stuff going on.’ And I replied, ‘Why should I leave? I’ve got everything I want here.’ ” These days, when actors regularly switch from stage to television to cinema and back again, accepting the role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek doesn’t appear that unusual. But it
by Family Guy creator and comedian Seth MacFarlane, which completed its first series in America last year. Patrick agrees. “Five minutes into the very first episode,” he observes, “my character is driving his Jag down Hollywood Boulevard, drinking whiskey out of a flask, eating chocolate marijuana and picking up a transexual prostitute. So the reputation I’ve acquired—which I thought was an albatross—has become this launchpad for doing outrageous things.” It’s obvious that Patrick takes a giddy delight in this newfound freedom. For many years, before Star Trek came knocking, With close friend and X-Men the classically trained co-star Sir Ian McKellan Stewart was content with 26
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Reader’s Digest
was far from obvious when Stewart It’s clear from this that, despite signed on in 1987, and by no means living in Los Angeles for 17 years, a guaranteed success. the Hollywood milieu was never “I’d been advised that it wouldn’t an ideal fit for Stewart. He returned get through the first season, that it’d to Britain permanently in 2014, and be cancelled. Everyone I knew in today seems more engaged than Hollywood said the same, including ever in British public life. As a selfmy agent. ‘Don’t worry about signing proclaimed socialist and activist, he a six-year contract, this show is going doesn’t shrink from expressing his nowhere.’ By the time the second opinion on the current government season began, we were all thinking, and the state of the Labour party. What have we got “I think that Jeremy ourselves into? I had a [Corbyn] has begun mild panic—I thought, I’m beginning to to find a voice that’s Is this going to be the clearly authentic and have the feeling passionate,” he states rest of my life? I’ve got that there’s a things I need to do.” with conviction. “I’m Stewart’s response to beginning to have a route for the this malaise was to get feeling that there’s a Labour party on the road in his spare route for Labour that that might be time and onto any stage might be very exciting very exciting for for the country. I he could find. “The rest of the cast carried a placard for the country thought I was out of my the first election after mind, but on Saturday the war in 1945, when mornings I’d settle down and create [Labour prime minister] Clement a number of solo shows. Then, on Attlee got in, and those principles weekends, I’d pack everything into remain my principles.” the trunk of my car and go to a He leans forwards and fixes me college or a community centre or with a determined look. a campus and put on a show. I had “I fear the stubbornness and a Shakespeare show, a Tennyson self-obsession of the Tories, and the show, an Arthurian show. But the one damage they can do. We all know that took off was A Christmas Carol the Tory party is essentially a party —I ended up doing it four times on of self-interest, no matter what they Broadway and twice in London. It say. What’s the phrase they use? Oh gave me the sense that the theatrical yes, ‘compassionate conservatism’. world was still mine if I wanted to Bulls**t! There’s no such thing as exist in it.” compassionate conservatism. It’s 05•2016
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exclusively about self-interest and protecting the status quo.” His outspokenness has even led him into the world of Twitter and social media—albeit at the urging of his publicist. “She took me out for breakfast about three years ago and said, ‘You’ve got to get involved. It’s essential for the work that you do and the work that you want to do. You’ve got to engage.’ ” Indeed, there’s plenty to engage with in the near future. As well as another season of Blunt Talk, this September sees Patrick once again on stage in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land with his great friend and X-Men co-star Ian McKellen. Then there’s another “X-Men related” Hollywood blockbuster, about which he’s appropriately tight-lipped. Although now 75, Patrick appears to have the energy and drive of someone 30 years younger.
“I don’t know what happened,” he says, shaking his head. “I mean, that’s not an affectation on my part— I really don’t know what happened. I was 45 the other week, and I don’t know where those 30 years have gone. That’s one of the reasons I’ve gone back to meditation, because it slows time down. “Also, I take more care of myself now than ever before. I hold onto the bannisters when I go downstairs and look both ways many times when I cross the road. Although I’m mystified by how I got here, I don’t want to leave now. I want to hang around this place as long as possible. I didn’t use to have fun—I was too serious and insecure—but now I’m having such fun.” Green Room is in cinemas this month and is reviewed on p20. For Star Trek DVDs and more, visit shop.readersdigest.co.uk
MR SERIOUS A reviewer on Amazon.co.uk (rumoured to be a parent who’s bored of bedtime stories) has posted some enlightening reviews of the Mr Men series. Here are some of our favourite reflections: Mr Bounce: “An infant’s primer in Existentialism, we find in this book a weighty treatise on the personal politics of agency and empowerment.” Mr Messy: “If 1984 or The Trial had been a children’s book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control.” Mr Tickle: “Our hero preaches a method of catharsis—a call to arms against becoming too bogged down by self-suppression and normative regulation.” 28
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