Movies - TV
Star Trek Changed The Way Patrick Stewart Thought About Acting
By DEVIN MEENAN
In a 2011 interview with the BBC, Stewart named "Star Trek: The Next Generation" as the high point of his career, while maintaining, "I love the cinema but the theater is my life." Stewart said that "TNG changed everything," for him.
Early in his stage career, he was told he would never be a leading man thanks to his premature baldness, so the chance to play the lead is what drew him to "Trek." Initially wary of the TV format, Stewart came to enjoy the work, even reciting the technobabble (he especially likes the phrase "space-time continuum").
He recalled, with just a touch of self-deprecation, that, "right up until 1987, when I went to Hollywood to start filming 'Star Trek: The Next Generation,' if you didn't go to the Royal Shakespeare Company you'd never heard of Patrick Stewart. It was after that, that everything changed."
Speaking to the Guardian in 2022, Stewart recalled it was a "Trek" convention where he realized the scope of the show's, and by extension his, audience. Considering how Stewart has said he feels safe performing on stage, it's not surprising he took easily to convention appearances because he was still on-stage, only now he had a bigger audience than ever before.