Movies - TV
Star Trek: TNG’s Most Famous Episode Took A Painful Toll On Patrick Stewart
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
The “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode “The Best of Both Worlds” was a memorable event. However, filming it was excruciating for Patrick Stewart, who played Jean-Luc Picard.
In the episode, Picard was kidnapped by malevolent cyborgs called the Borg and assimilated into their mechanical collective with machinery as Locutus. His individuality was erased.
To become Locutus, Stewart had to spend four hours in a makeup chair to apply the machines to his face and head. The actor’s personal plight seemed to mirror Picard’s.
At that point, Stewart had been famously acting on “Star Trek” for three years, a job that prevented him from being in extended stage productions as he might have preferred.
Stewart began to see “Star Trek” as a blessing and a curse. He longed to refine his craft and challenge himself, and being a celebrity in the fame machine was antithetical to that.
The actor poignantly explained in his autobiography, “Making It So: A Memoir,” how in both fiction and reality, he saw himself being swallowed by a machine against his will.
Stewart wrote, “It was an aptly intense storytelling journey [...] Locutus knew that Jean-Luc was alive inside him but helpless and trapped, which really resonated with me.”
“[T]he ‘celebrity’ I had become knew that the normal jobbing actor I’d been [...] was the ‘real’ me. Doing those two episodes was emotionally close to home and [...] painful.”