Stewart: I Wanted Change
2 min read
In a new interview for Variety‘s Actors on Actors, Sir Patrick Stewart spoke about what he expected when it came to Jean-Luc Picard for Star Trek: Picard.
After playing Picard on The Next Generation for so long, it was difficult to separate the character from the actor. “During the seven years that we filmed Next Generation and the four feature films that followed it, without intending to, Picard came closer and closer and closer to me, to Patrick,” said Stewart. “After a while, there was no place that I could identify where Jean-Luc left off and Patrick Stewart began.”
So when it came to Star Trek: Picard, Stewart was ready for a change. “What I did want — to the writers, I cited the movie Logan that I did with Hugh Jackman, the last of the X-Men movies,” he said. “That movie found the two of us in conditions that were totally unlike anything that we experienced before, and it was thrilling for both of us, because we were continually being challenged. I said to my fellow producers, ‘I would like the same thing.’ The contrast between the Picard that I had been in Next Generation, and how the years that have passed had changed him. He was now angry, moody, guilty, sad, lonely, which he had never been before.
“There was a touch of that with both Jean-Luc Picard and Charles Xavier. I felt with both of them that they do have an impact…on my private life. In that there was a sort of standard of morality and behavior that you needed to uphold because if you didn’t they would reflect badly, negatively, on the character that you were playing.”
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