‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Patrick Stewart (‘Star Trek: Picard’)

Sir Patrick Stewart, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a remarkable English actor of stage and screen whose career spans seven decades and has been recognized with Emmy, Tony, SAG and Golden Globe award nominations, as well as two Olivier awards. For the first half of his career, he was primarily known as a Shakespearean actor. During the second, he has been famous for playing Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the starship Enterprise, on the syndicated drama series Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 through 1994. He continued the role in four feature films, and, from 2020 through this year, on Paramount+’s drama series Star Trek: Picard, for which he is now, at 82, on the hunt for an Emmy nom.

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Over the course of our conversation at Stewart’s home in Los Angeles — ahead of a visit from his Star Trek co-star and dear friend Jonathan Frakes — the thespian reflected on his dark childhood, and how stage acting came to provide him with a much-needed escape. He got candid about how a theatrical reading that he performed in 1987 at UCLA, against all odds, led to his casting on The Next Generation, and how he came to understand and embrace the character Picard. Stewart also opened up about why, years later, after doing all sorts of other things — from great work in the theater to starring as Prof. Charles Xavier in seven blockbuster X-Men films to voicing characters for Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad! — he was convinced to return to the part for which he is most famous on Star Trek: Picard. The series finds Picard, as Stewart puts it, not living, but waiting to die before he is drawn back into action.