Patrick Stewart kept engaging science fiction and fantasy after Star Trek.
Even before Patrick Stewart took the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Shakespearean-trained British thespian had science fiction and fantasy credits in his resume. He didn’t have many of them, but they were notable!
Excalibur (1981), director John Boorman’s ambitious and extravagant adaptation of Le Morte Darthur, was “the first large-scale movie that I was ever in,” Stewart told the Associated Press. In it he played Leondegrance, one of young Arthur’s early supporters and father of Guenevere.
In another ambitious and extravagant genre film, director David Lynch’s Dune (1984), Stewart played Gurney Halleck, who trains young Paul Atreides in weapons and warfare. Although Dune helped make him a familiar face to U.S. audiences, Stewart told a 2013 Emerald City Comic Con audience he wasn’t even supposed to be in it!
Fortunately for us Star Trek fans, heads other than Gene Roddenberry’s prevailed in casting Stewart as the captain of the NCC-1701-D. It’s hard to imagine our favorite franchise or science fiction and fantasy without him!
As we celebrate Sir Patrick’s 81st birthday, let’s look back at some of the many science fiction and fantasy roles he’s taken on since he last “made it so” on the Enterprise.
Patrick Stewart made a marvelous Professor X
Patrick Stewart is one of few Star Trek actors whose status as a bona fide sci-fi icon rests in equal measure for their work in another major genre franchise.
In 2000, he began his tenure as Charles Xavier, better known as “Professor X”—the enigmatic telepath who brings together Marvel Comics’ merry band of mutants, the X-Men.
Here’s his first appearance in the role, in X-Men (2000):
Through four more films—X2: X-Men United (2003), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and Logan (2017)—as well as an uncredited cameo in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Sir Patrick brought all the dignity and gravity you’d expect to the role.
Although Professor X can be a bit of an unpredictable character in the Marvel Comics (especially in the earliest issues, where he’s carrying a torch for Jean Gray—yikes!), Stewart plays the mutant mentor as relentlessly reasonable, principled, and genial.
In one scene in The Last Stand, he treats Wolverine with some of the brusqueness and insensitivity Xavier’s capable of showing in the source material (“I don’t have to explain myself, least of all to you”). On the whole, however, it’s easy for audiences to see why the Professor, as Stewart plays him, inspires such loyalty among his pupils.
Both Patrick Stewart as Professor X and Ian McKellen as his lifelong friend and enemy Magneto elevated the comic book characters they played in a mass audience’s eyes. Their work is no small reason we’re still living in a golden age of superhero entertainment today.
Playing fantastic characters from classic literature and lore
Patrick Stewart’s post-Trek roles have included encounters with several classic fantasy characters.
For instance, he has played a sci-fi captain from the genre’s earliest days: Captain Nemo.
Jules Verne wrote two Voyages Extraordinaires featuring Nemo, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and The Mysterious Island (1875). The second served as source material for the 2005 TV film Mysterious Island.
Unlike Captain Picard, Captain Nemo didn’t go seeking out new life. He made a whole strange new world of his own!
Starting in 1991, Stewart played Ebenezer Scrooge in a critically acclaimed one-man stage version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In 1999, he played the holiday haunted miser in a full-cast TV movie.
More recently, Patrick Stewart played Merlin, fantasy’s archetypal enchanter, in The Kid Who Would Be King (2019). Strictly speaking, Stewart shares the role of Merlin. He plays the wizard in his true, aged form. Angus Imrie, who plays Merlin incognito as a young adult.
Stewart says he rewatched Excalibur as part of his preparation for this kid- and family-friendly updating of the Matter of Britain. He told the AP he noticed “quite a few” overlapping themes, but “Excalibur was a little bit more harsh.”
Oh, poop, I know that voice!
Patrick Stewart possesses one of science fiction’s most recognizable voices. No wonder so many animated sci-fi and fantasy projects have sought out his rich vocal talents. Here are just a few examples from his extensive genre voice work credits.
In Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001), Stewart voiced King Goobot, a literally slimy alien monarch who’s no match for the STEM-on-steroids school-age whiz kid.
In Gnomeo & Juliet (2011), he voiced a role of which Captain Picard might have been envious: Shakespeare himself, explaining the plot he wrote for his “pair of star-cross’d lovers” to the dismay of the movie’s diminutive hero. (You can watch it for yourself in the clip at the top of this slide.)
And in The Emoji Movie (2017), a light fantasy in which those silly little symbols in your text messages take on lives of their own, Stewart even dignified potty talk with his dulcet tones as the Poop emoji.
Promoting the film, Stewart joked with ABC News about his motives for taking the role:
"It might have partly been one of my team saying, “Patrick, this could be the apex of your career.” … And then there were all of those people who said Patrick Stewart’s acting is a pile of poop. Well now they’ve got justification."
We Star Trek fans would never say such a thing about Patrick Stewart’s acting.
We’re certainly glad his current post-TNG project, season two of Star Trek: Picard, has him maneuvering his way through sci-fi adventure again!