The Rich Roll Podcast - Make It So: Sir Patrick Stewart On Surviving Trauma, Staying Engaged & Lessons From The Artist Life

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Beloved icon of stage and screen, my guest today is the singular Sir Patrick Stewart. The knighted Shakespeare thespian, captain of the Starship Enterprise, international treasure, and master storyteller is here and brings conversational delights lifted from 83 years of life. Today Patrick shares tales from his humble beginnings, how theatre saved him, and how childhood trauma informed his career and led to his passion for mental health advocacy. We also discuss legacy, longevity, honing your craft, the importance of mentorship, and his unique friendship with Sir Ian McKellen. We of course dive into some epic Star Trek stories and explore why the series is so indelible—which naturally led to thoughts on UFOs and the ghost that he is absolutely convinced took up residence in his Silverlake home.  The occasion for today’s exchange is Patrick’s brand new memoir, Making It So—an excellent read that traces the improbable story of his life from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire, England, to the heights of Hollywood and worldwide acclaim. They say never meet your heroes. I disagree. As a long-time Trekkie, this was a pinch-me moment. It was an absolute pleasure and honor to talk with a man I respect and admire tremendously. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: ROKA: Roka.com/RICHROLL Peak Design: peakdesign.com/RICHROLL AG1: DrinkAG1.com/RICHROLL Inside Tracker x Hydrow: fitnessfuelslongevity.com Modern Elder Academy: meawisdom.com Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

On screen. There are many great resonances about being an actor. One of my first attractions to acting was that I could forget about Patrick Stewart. To not be Patrick Stewart, if only for a few hours a week, was such a relief. And there was a price to pay for that. The knighted Shakespearean captain of the Starship Enterprise, international treasure and master storyteller is here in the house.

And he brings with him conversational delights lifted from his 83 years of life. We have tales from his humble beginnings. We talk about how the theater saved him and how childhood trauma informed his career, which of course led us into a deep dive on mental health generally and his passion for mental health advocacy. We also talk about friendship, particularly the nature of his beautiful friendship with Sir Ian McKellen. We discuss legacy, longevity, craft, mentorship, and why Star Trek is just so indelible,

which of course led to brief thoughts on UFOs and also this incredible story about the ghost that he is absolutely convinced took up residence in his Silver Lake home. All of these stories and themes are more fully elaborated in Sir Patrick's wonderful new memoir, Making It So. As a longtime Trekkie, this one was a dream. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

So here we go. This is me and Sir Patrick. You look amazing. I'm thrilled to have you here. You don't look a day older than you look in Star Trek Next Generation. I want to know what your longevity secrets are. You're so spry and with it and funny and present and fit.

There's gotta be some secrets. Work. That's it? Staying plugged in. Well, it has been for me in that life, as opposed to work, can get quite complicated in our business. The hours are long.

You could be anywhere in any corner of the world. I came from a very work-conscious background. My father was proud of what he did, even though, as you may have seen in the book, that the highlight of his career was Second World War. Ten years in India in the 20s. The moment he heard my mother was pregnant, he took off. his military career at the end of 1945 as a regimental sergeant major of the parachute regiment. And that meant everything to him. He was very, very proud of that. One day, a guy, just after my father had died, I met him in a pub. And he said, I know you, you're Alf Stewart's son. And I said, yeah, that's right.

And he said, your dad, you know, when he walked on a parade ground, the birds and the trees stopped singing. What do you make of that? What does that mean? Presence, I think. I mean, I know what it means as an actor that i i know mostly that from watching other actors you know somebody walks on stage and you go oh my god now i don't know why that happens but there is a there is a focus a concentration um an intensity objectives that make them and other people yeah you forget that they're there

yeah no you know those people when they walk into the room the the sense of weight and charisma and gravitas that he obviously earned and and what you just shared uh you know has a sensibility of of kind of reverence and and respect for who was, but he was a challenging guy as well. He was not an easy guy to grow up underneath. Oh, no. I mean, he first came home when I was about 15 months old, and I have no recollection of that. I was about 15 months old, and I have no recollection of that. And one more time, I think in 1943, he came home when I was probably four.

And I just have memories of a man in a uniform looking kind of exciting, I thought, at the time. No, the problems began when the war ended. And his colonel said, so what are you going to do, Sergeant, when you get back home? And my father said, oh, I'll get a job. And he said, well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. And he explained that he had contact at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Now, the Dorchester is one of the top four or five hotels, historic hotels in London. Famous for its high tea. That's right, yeah.

Which, by the way, I recommend. You've done it once. You've done it once. Good for you. Yeah, Americans love it. It's great. And he said there is a vacancy coming up in a few weeks for a doorman, an assistant doorman. But the doorman is going to be retiring in two years' time, and his job would be yours.

And my father said, said wow that's great and there was a an apartment that came with the job in the hotel wow they said you're married aren't you and he said yes and they said well we'll employ your wife too she could get a job in the hotel as well i mean it sounded wonderful and yet wife- His wife, my mother said, no, I'm not leaving West Yorkshire. This has been my home all her life. And it had. It had.

In fact, the little town we lived in, a population of 9,000. And it has its own wild dialect that's indecipherable to most of us, right? Using words like thee and thou and like, yeah, I mean, it's pretty crazy the way that you grew up speaking. Yeah, yeah. I was not allowed to say thee and thou to my father though.

That was an insult. Disrespect. But I mean, as a child playing and, you know, you could say to people, oh, the, which was always critical in some way. Or that was the way that we shortened it. That doesn't understand, lad. You know, they don't know what they're talking about. So there was this semi-ancient speech that was ours. And in fact, I spoke a strong dialect when I was a child.

And when I was 13, I had to lose it. Yeah. Can you bring it back at all? My family have always told me, oh, you can't do yorkshire anymore no you you changed your act and i did i learned a new accent which was rp received pronunciation uh classical bbc news time english not anymore because now they deliberately employ people with accents and the world has become a more relaxed and easier place in many respects, some of them not good. And it's a better time. But back then, well, let me think of anything I could say.

OK, there's a very simple one. think of anything i could say okay uh there's a very simple one when i would go to a friend's house he would open the door and i would say i don't like it out translate that for me i have no idea atta art thou lakin 15th century word for playing. Actors in Shakespeare's day were called Lakers. Wow. That's kind of amazing. Not basketball fans. Given the Los Angeles Lakers, there's a double entendre there that's super interesting. Well, it's certainly a 14th century word.

It could be older. Ater lakin at, out. Are you coming out to play is the translation. So it was it was dialect. It wasn't accent alone. I would go home to my family and they would say, you know, Yorkshire lad anymore. Not anymore. You know, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Disowned. My mother liked it because she liked to hear me speaking very very grand uh-huh you know when i had an accent like this which was very very cultured and visual and sophisticated um i don't talk like that right right um back to your your dad a little bit i mean you spoke about you about some of the things that he did in World War II. I mean, this was a guy who ended up, I think, was he airlifted out of Cherbourg, like around Dunkirk, right? Yeah. So this guy had done a lot. He's parachuting into

Creek and doing some pretty ballsy, crazy stuff. But he comes home, finds himself back in Yorkshire. And it's pretty easy to kind of identify what was going on with him now, given what we understand about what happens with veterans when they return from conflict zones. But at that time it was just shell shock, nobody understood it. And of course with that, there's domestic violence,

there's alcohol abuse, and a whole array of sordid behaviors that you were on the kind of receiving end of as a young person. Yes. At the hands of my father, unlike my headmaster, I didn't receive personally any violence. He would raise his hand several times, and the moment that he did that, I would freeze and become something that he wasn't going to hit. He beat my mother, and he did it in front of me and my brother,

who was five years older than me. I was the baby of the family. And it was appalling. And, I mean, I've only subsequently learned. I did a television program for the BBC quite a few years ago now. And they had a specialist of PTSD on the show and um he he'd been told about my father and then he talked to me and he said he was ill and if it's possible at all for you to allow that to become part of your recollection of your unpleasant childhood.

He was sick and could not control himself. So it was a mental condition as much as anything. And he was angry. And I always thought that once I heard this story about the Dorchester Hotel, that he never ceased to be angry with my mother because he knew that that job would have been perfect for him. Because he was smart. He had conversation and he could talk. He had language.

And then he had this dialect, which people loved to hear. They thought it was charming. He would have been a star standing in the front door of the Dorchester Hotel. Yeah, so he held on to a certain resentment, took out his frustration on the people that he cared about. that this was an illness, that he was a victim of something he had no control over, allows you to then have compassion, not only for your mother as a victim of domestic abuse, but also for the perpetrator to have some kind of empathy

for why he ended up behaving that way, which in turn gives you a certain freedom. You're liberated from holding onto your anger around that. And I know it wasn't, I mean, I don't think you shared that publicly until maybe 2010 or something like that. You held onto that for a long time. For a very long time, I was ashamed.

And I was ashamed that I couldn't impact what was so awful about my home life. I couldn't change it. Did you blame yourself? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that my elder brother did.

Yeah. Yeah, because you were the younger. If anyone was going to feel like he needed to, you needed to make it better for you, it would be him. Yeah. He was, and he only died last year. And he took care of me. And if ever I was at any risk, he would protect me. and if ever I was at any risk, he would protect me.

And then as I got older and I wanted to do all the things he did, play soccer with him and his friends, play cricket with him and his friends, and of course he didn't want his kid brother to be hanging out with us at all because he was five years older than me, they all were, you know. And he nevertheless always had an eye for me and i only went into therapy um about the 90s i'd never done in what was the revelation of engaging with therapy What was the revelation of engaging with therapy? Well, one of the things I learned was how to listen. Because she mostly listened.

I mean, when she did talk, she would say, tell me. How? In what way? And so that she was always inviting me to contribute the conversations. But then as my time with her for several years went on, we began to talk about mental issues, mental disturbances, bouts of anger. I still occasionally get them. And I know where it comes from. It happened only a few days ago, I'm ashamed get them. And I know, I know where it comes from. It happened only a few days ago. I'm ashamed to say. Well, I had read that there was an article

a couple of years ago that said that at eight, you're 83 now, right? At 80, you were still in therapy. Are you still in therapy now? No, I'm not. You're not. Except- Cured, except for the occasional angry outburst.

They don't happen very often. They're quite rare, I'm relieved to say. But no, I have two therapists now, but I see them when I feel that there is a need rather than it's not a daily or weekly event for me. I'm interested in the relationship between that childhood dynamic and your burgeoning relationship with the theater. It feels like the theater is really what saved you. Finding yourself amongst a community of like-minded people at an early age becomes this true salvation for your life. And you had a couple instrumental teachers

and mentors that kind of guided you and nudged you in that direction, saw something in you very early on. There are many, for me, great resonances about being an actor. And one of the strongest is the people I encounter. Finding that there were in the world other young people, and some of them significantly older, who felt the same kind of isolation that I felt. And yet, in the company of actors, there was an almost intuitive connection that was made between us. And I was 12 years old when I first

was dumped into a large group of actors on a course that was run. It was a brand new course run by the West Riding County Council in Yorkshire. And the minimum age was 14. And it was in my headmaster's office that I met a man called Gerald Tyler. He's in the book. And he had come to say that the county council were going to run an eight-day theater course, a residential theater course. By that, it meant we had camp beds to lie on in school classrooms. But nevertheless, from the moment that I arrived there, I was in the company of people like me. Now, some of them were highly educated. I mean, I got a big crush on a girl who was at grammar school, but it didn't work out.

I was at secondary modern school. No, no. And yet, it was our love of acting, performing, of plays, scripts, texts, being in front of an audience, which never scared me ever at all. And there was a reason for this. One of my first attractions to acting was that I could forget about Patrick Stewart. Right. That was my next question. How much of this, aside from finding like-minded people in this tribe of young artists, how much of it was an escape from your own life or the opportunity to step outside who you were and just become somebody altogether different as a defense mechanism and not having to deal with whatever pain is kind of lingering in your subconscious. You explain it perfectly.

Yeah. That's exactly how it was. To not be Patrick Stewart, if only for a few hours a week, was such a relief. To explore being someone other than myself with a different background. being someone other than myself with a different background. I mean, the first role that I played, other than this thing that we'd done about the history of Yorkshire and Merfield, where I grew up, was a comedy called The Happiest Days of Your Life. You may have encountered it very occasionally, it crops up in theatre very occasionally. And it was all set in a private boys' school, a rather exclusive private boys' school. And it was wartime, and a private girls' school had been found places in the school. So there were now boys and girls playing there and I played a

character you see I remember his name called Hopcroft Minor he had an older brother who is Hopcroft and and it was such a joy to be playing an upper class child. Even though I struggled with the accent, I didn't really have a proper received pronunciation accent until I was 15 or 16. But I was learning. I was, and sometimes it made people laugh when they heard me speak because it sounded so portentous. So becoming someone else, that was the main attraction. And I could forget who Patrick Stewart was. But not with any self-awareness around that. It's not as if you understood.

I mean, a young person wouldn't be expected to understand that, oh, I'm doing this because I'm trying to get away from this other thing. But you do have a moment when you were doing the Macbeth rendering that was set in a Cold War era, where you connected the dots between your kind of actor sensibility and this character that you were inhabiting, tracing it back to your father. Do you know the story I'm referring to? Yeah, I do. It was a great invitation to be offered that role by a wonderful actor called Rupert Gould, who was just starting out then, but is now very well established in the UK. And he's done a couple of films as well.

We both felt that... I mean, if you're interested in the theatre, you know who Macbeth is and what he did. So we wanted to put him into a context in which what he was was understandable and that was intriguing um and i i did go and talk to a lot of people and uh about the because he's macbeth is ill and gets iller as the play goes on um you remember the story i told in the book about running into ian mckellen in the yeah in the charing cross road one day and he said so how's he going there macbeth and and uh oh god i was so uncomfortable because ian was the Macbeth of my generation.

Him and Judi Dench, who played Lady Macbeth. I saw that production and Trevon Lund directed it. And it was amazing. And the cast just sat in a circle around a quite small studio stage and just stood up when their turn came. So it had an intimacy about it but um and then ian said to me um oh um if i can there's there's just one thing i'd like to mention about playing macbeth and i said anything at all please and he said okay, the line that begins the famous speech, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. He said, the most important word in that first line is and.

And I had it in a flash. I knew exactly what he meant. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow creeps in this petty... You're rolling then, you're rolling. He unlocked it. He unlocked it for you.

Oh, not just that speech, but it spread into the rest of the play. And I knew that Macbeth was inside me. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide,

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But it's when you dress up in the costuming of the character and look in the mirror and you have this epiphany. Yes, yes. Um, the first dress rehearsal, I'd grown a moustache, quite a heavyweight moustache, unlike my father's, who had a very, very narrow, small Sergeant Major's moustache. And I was in uniform, and it was the end of a battle. We were coming from a battle, myself and Banquo, and I had an overcoat on,

and I had a military cap pulled down over my face and a rifle slung over my shoulder. And I was just getting these things on. The dresser was helping me. And then she said, Have a look in the mirror and see what you think. And. The dresser was helping me. And then she said, have a look in the mercy, you think. And my father was looking back at me. Unmistakable, him.

And it gave me quite a shock. But then I saw the advantage of it. I knew him. He wasn't inside me other than he had been my father. And that allowed me to embrace him and bring him in and feel about him, both his rages and his fear and his sadness and the pain that he'd had because he'd had he'd been wounded several times fortunately never very seriously um but he had been wounded and of course he jumped out of airplanes yeah well just fascinating from the perspective of kind of unconsciously inhabiting

this character and then finally realizing like oh oh, this is what I was doing, you know, and being able to connect with that and develop a greater understanding of this complicated person. Yeah. And also understanding that on some level he contributed to your skill as an actor through that process is kind of amazing. I wish that I could have told him exactly what you said. He got to see you succeed. He passed away shortly before Next Generation though, is that right?

Yes, he did. And he would have loved Next Generation, particularly that I was Captain Picard because he was always a non-commissioned officer, although he became the highest ranking non-commissioned officer. He was a field marshal of non-commissioned officers. Yeah, you playing a military officer with great integrity would have appealed to him. Yeah. It really would.

But then, you know, as time went by, I discovered that there was an under-the-covers aspect to Picard as well. that because the writers and directors were very interested in uncovering a man that we had seen almost nothing off there was one scene in one episode when i screamed i yelled at a woman i threw something at a glass fronted uh i don't know cocktail cabinet or something and shattered it and and and this was shocking for people they'd never seen jean-luc picard like this but i knew how to do it yeah and uh it's inside you it was inside you the whole time yeah it's um and there was a price to pay for that. Yeah. In rehearsals, I just delved into all of that and put it into the role.

By then, I'd had two divorces, and I was to blame for both of them. I watched the first episode of Picard from season one the other night. And I was really struck by, there's that scene where you're being interviewed and your buttons get pushed. And then you kind of unleash, right?

And it reminded me of, it was very similar to the Jack Nicholson Sorkin scene in A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessup, you know, being provoked just enough to let the lion out, you know, like, you know, basically your version of saying, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. Like, did you order the code red? You're goddamn right, I ordered the code red. Like that speech that you give is very resonant of, it reminded me of that in there.

And it's like that there's that latent, not necessarily anger, a little self-righteousness earned through experience. The other kind of example of that for me was when you were Leontes in Winter's Tale, right? Which is kind of a watershed moment in you kind of reckoning with your past. Yes, it was.

And it was very challenging when I read the play, first of all, I'd seen the play and found it interesting, but it didn't appeal to me in the way that so much of Shakespeare did. One day, I was in the green room of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. I was working there, and I'd been made this offer of Leontes in The Winter's

Tale. And sitting alone at a table was Dempegge Ashcroft, whom I didn't know, but she was a member of the company, but I wasn't in the place she was in. And I said, Dempegge, may I sit by you? And she said, yes, of course. Come on, sit down. And we had a chat. And I said, look, I've got to ask you this. I've been offered Leontes in Winter's Tale. And I saw her face change straight away. And I said, I don't know what to do about it. Could you give me any help or advice? And she said, turn it down.

Don't do it. Don't do it. He's a bad, bad man. And nobody likes him. The audience don't like him because he's vile to everybody. There's nobody who's on his side, except, of course, there's one good friend

whom he kills. And I said to her, thank you. You've articulated what I think I was feeling. So that's great. And then the director said, well, have you made a decision? And I said, yes, I have. And I'm going to pass. And he said, tell me why. So I did. And he said, can we meet just one more time and talk? And so we did. And he said, you see, Patrick, the reason why I'm so determined to have you play this character is that you're not going to have to interpret him he's already inside you i know that i don't know how he knew it yeah what do you think he

saw that made him say that i don't know but he's a psychologist also right he is yes yes. Yes, he is. Ronald Ayer is his name. And yes, he is. Brilliant, brilliant man. And he said, if you do it, I give you my word. I will never leave your side. Not one moment. I will be there. And he was, too. Boy, it was hard. It was really hard. But one thing that came out of it I'm so grateful for, and I looked at it this morning and adjusted it, there is a photo on my desk of Winter's Tale, of me as Leontes and my dear, beloved Bernard Lloyd we have been talking to him and I've been going crazy in the character and and they were taking photos it was a photo shoot but they wanted action they wanted the real play and in this photograph he has his hand on my arm and he's leaning towards me. And there is so much gentleness in his face, so much empathy and sympathy that when I was first shown that photograph, I knew it was for all time and it's been on my desk in a frame ever since then because

that was that became the symbol of what kindness and friendship could mean in a in a relationship because I had not been too good at that in my adult life. And then Bernie died, actually it's probably two years ago now, and I was with him until quite close to his death. And he was very stiff and hurting and my wife said, Sunny said, can I just give you a little massage? I think it might help you. And he said, yes, okay, okay. And he stretched out and she massaged him for half an hour

and then she hugged him and then I hugged him and we left and we got to our car and we burst into tears, both of us. So that picture of him touching my arm with such kindness is part of my daily life. Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, I think what I extracted or took from that story and your experience of doing Winter's Tale

was that you have this director who's also a psychologist who identified something in your psyche that needed to come out that would contribute to the performance and make it great and terrifying. And I know there are stories of people in the audience who felt like we shouldn't even be watching this. It was so intense. Absolutely.

But from a psychologist point of view, it's almost ingenious that he, it was a form of therapy for you to connect with that part, to realize that that piece of your dad is inside of you, or there's that unhealed pain that resides inside of you from that experience growing up that still required you to reckon with it and look at it. And perhaps that was a piece in the puzzle that led you towards therapy and kind of making peace with this that has on some level, healed those wounds. That's very true. And it was something that I could absorb into my work,

into my acting, and my approach to bringing a role to life. Albee's great play, I think the great American play of the 20th century, I'm sorry, Mr. Miller, he wrote a play called who's afraid of virginia sure and um i got to play george the husband it's a couple two couples a husband and wife who are middle-aged and a young married couple with a tinge of alcoholism sprinkled in oh lord yes so much liquor yeah yeah and i had some experience of that too um but my two broken marriages

i realized gave me a profound sense of what had been going on inside me during that time when the marriages were breaking up and that I could absorb them into George. I have another photograph that sits on my desk. into george i have another photograph that sits on my desk and um it's uh it is i because it's going to be in the book when the photographs are put into the book it will be there yeah i've just got the galley here so i don't even have the final one it's not out yet um there's it's quite a collection of photographs it will surprise people which is good yeah i'm looking forward to that um especially my childhood photographs um but in in this one i'm playing george and it's a scene when martha his

wife actually isn't on the stage um it's a scene in the last act of the play. And I was wearing a wig, thinning hair, but some of the hair was danging over my forehead and my head is down and I look so depressed and fearful. And I know that that was authentic because I was able to tap into those feelings that I had. When I was getting my first divorce and we were living apart and I went to bed at night, and this is the only time this has ever happened for me, I was in so much terror that my legs sweated. Just my legs, nothing else at all. And I've heard that that can happen, but it was an indication of what was inside me. Well,

one of the great joys, including Captain Jean-Luc Picard, is that having to immerse yourself into someone else can be so rich in lessons and learning and understanding and getting closer to other people as well. Yeah. Well, it breeds empathy. You're literally walking a mile in someone else's shoes. Yes. And it changes your view of humanity, I suspect. That's right.

Yeah. When I was doing Macbeth, I did it for exactly 365 days, the first and the last performance. For a whole year, I played that guy. I lived that guy. And it became not good for me. mean for one thing i began drinking only when the show was over too much way too much and um i i his depressions and ferocity and despair towards the end of the play would begin to envelop me more and more as the evening or matinee days when we'd do it twice wore on. And it became difficult.

How do you create healthy boundaries around that so it doesn't seep in? And I guess it sounds like that's been a challenge for you. If you end up drinking a little bit too much and you know walking around brooding on on this character that you're inhabiting i've learned and sonny my wife has helped me with this that when i've finished a day on the set doesn't happen that often with filming but it can do but certainly when i come home from playing a stage role i deliberately let it go let it go i mean this is the gesture that i use shake it out

now i can go home and have some supper and not be in absolute fucking misery. Well, it also has to be an insane high to do that every night. And then you're supposed to just go home and go to bed when your hormones are going crazy. Cause you've just done this endurance event, this artistic endurance event, you know, in real time in front of a live audience who then receives you and you're, you're feeling that, you know, energy of the crowd. And then you're supposed to just go to sleep after that. Like, I don't know how that works. The last moment-

I'm always amazed at Broadway actors who just get up every night or sometimes twice a night and do that for incredibly long stretches. Oh. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I have a limit now on how long I can do a play for, particularly if it's a play that I know is going to be sucking me in. What's interesting is before the podcast, you were sharing about how you just

recorded the audio book for this. And you said that was one of, if not the most difficult things that you've done as a performer. No question. Most difficult. Compared to being on Broadway every night or 20-hour days on Star Trek? I've already told you why. I'm being myself. That's really hard. I wrote it. I had no intention of reading out loud, recording it. Oh, come on. Of course you're going to read your audio book. Believe me, it came as a shock.

With your voice, you think somebody else is going to voice you in your autobiography? I don't listen to audio books. I've never heard an audio book. I've never recorded one before. I mean, people keep saying, you ought to do it. You know, it can be fun and, you know, it's interesting. No, I never ought to do it you know it can be fun and you know it's interesting no i never wanted to do it and uh so it was in my contract and it was only when i got around to reading the contract in detail that i saw that i was also committing to an audiobook

but simon schuster and particularly christina the producer that I work with on the audio book, has been fantastic. I can only do about two hours. I've once or twice gotten close to three. And I've once rapped after an hour because it just destroyed me, wore me out doing it. It's so difficult. I met two actors who said, let's give you a warning. If you've never done an audio book before, it is the hardest work you'll ever do. And I said, but you're sitting down with a microphone a few inches.

I've got to be hard. They said, well, if you do it, you wait and see. I think people would be aghast if you didn't end up voicing the audio book to this. It would be it just would not be right. Well, I'm doing it every morning. voicing the audio book to this. It would be, it just would not be right. Well, I'm doing it every morning and that's one of the reasons

why my voice is a little gravelly because I don't know what it is. It's what I'm putting into the morning's work that, and I only ever stop recording when I think it's time for my voice to be rested. Well, you sound great. You mentioned friendship a little bit earlier, It's time for my voice to be rested, you know? Well, you sound great. You mentioned friendship a little bit earlier,

that photograph that's on your desk, which leads me to my curiosity around your friendship with Ian McKellen, which, you know, I think we can all agree this is friend goals for all of us. Like, it's such a beautiful relationship that you have with this person. It motivated me to go on the internet and kind of find pictures of him as a young man, because you describe him as just, there's a mythos around who this person was, even when he was young, you know, many decades ago, that just portrays him as larger than life. And sure enough, I mean,

the images of him as a young man are just absolutely striking. Beautiful. Yeah. But he was somebody who was very intimidating to everybody, somebody everybody knew was going to be on the rise. And I think there's this idea that the two of you had been friends from the get-go, but that is not the case. No, no, no, no. I first met him at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but we never worked together. Only some years later, we worked once.

We did a Tom Stoppard play called Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, EGBDF. And Ian was in it. And I was very shy of him. What was it about him? It was the way he listened when you talked to him. Because Ian is known as a talker himself. But he is a wonderful listener. himself, but he is you know he's

got a great sense of humor and uh and a great sense of irony particularly um and so uh egbdf was one thing and john wood and ian mckellen were the two leading actors i just simply played a psychiatrist um i should be so lucky and um ian um i i don't know how to um i've tried i've sat in front of my computer for a long time, sometimes thinking about Ian and the affection that I have for him and what he gave me when we worked together and when I watched him work on stage. And now in our friendship,

age. And now in our friendship, it's as close to a love affair as I shall ever have with a man. Yeah. I don't know if you know this, but if you Google Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, one of the first things that pops up is this question, is Ian McKellen married to Patrick Stewart? But there's actually a really funny story behind that. Do you know what I'm referring to? Yeah. So, at one point yourself, Ian and Hugh Jackman all appear on the Graham Norton show and Ian announces that he is going to marry you. So, there's what he actually meant and there's how that was interpreted. Yeah, that's right. He was the priest at our wedding and he was, he had been qualified. And so far as I know, Sonny and I were the only couple he married, although he had multiple offers once the word got around that he was... I have no doubt. Yeah. So, he ends up marrying you. I guess you were going to get married in

Nevada, but there was a pesky state law around his ministry, his sort of legal... It was not recognized in Nevada. And so, we would go through a mockery of a wedding. So I think as I understood the story, yeah, you were in Lake Tahoe, you were gonna get married on the Nevada side, but he wasn't legally permitted to do that. So you all crossed the border into California and did an impromptu ceremony in a Mexican restaurant.

In a Mexican restaurant at 11 o'clock at night. Yeah. Just like a small group of you, right? Yeah, yeah. Oh, there were five of us. So we had witnesses too. And it was extraordinary. Let's talk about Star Trek.

What? Do you remember that part of your life? It's gotta be a blur though. Most of it's gotta be one big blur. Oh, yes. We recorded over- How many seasons? Chris Swan will know.

Seven seasons. We did something like 174 episodes. Uh-huh. And there are only a handful of them, I remember. Yeah. The rest have just all gone into the melting pot. But there are some vivid recollections I do have of certain episodes and certain actors that I worked with and what that meant to me. And the fact that I was getting a break in popular TV. was it LeVar Burton who put a sign on your door that said something like,

beware unknown British Shakespearean actor inside. Like this was your introduction. I mean, you went from being this, just a theater person into the public consciousness very quickly. And the story behind how you got Star Trek, which you go into in detail in the book is super fascinating.

I know Ian told you not to do it. He was trying to talk you out of it. Yep, he did. He was the only one who did. He's apologized for that. He has said he was wrong. I think it's interesting and interesting to try to understand

what makes Star Trek such a special idea that has left such an indelible kind of mark on our culture and why it continues to persist and be so popular. I think the strongest thing is that it is a vision of the future and it is a positive hopeful vision of the future oh yes dreadful things happen have happened in star trek but behind gene roddenberry's motivation for creating the the first series and then coming to work with us was that he wanted to leave behind a sense of positivity and hopefulness and confidence. And it's the one thing that he talked about with me. And actually, what he said was,

I had lunch with him. We only had two meals together, um, because we didn't have actually much in common. He played a lot of golf and I don't play any golf at all. Well, the first, the first meeting with him didn't go so well, right? He did not want you for the role. It was a disaster. Um, and he hadn't invited me it was my encounter with well robert justman had come to ucla to see a public lecture which an actress and myself were illustrating with extracts from plays uh shakespeare plays and uh he'd seen it and he went back to the office the next morning and he said, we found our captain.

And they said, what are you talking about? And they said, and Gene Rodman said, get him in this morning. Let's have a look at him if you think he's that good. And so I got the phone call at nine o'clock in the morning and I was in Gene's office at 11 o'clock that day. And he got out of his chair. I got the phone call at nine o'clock in the morning and I was in Gene's office at 11 o'clock that day. And he got out of his chair. There were two other men in the room, including Robert Justman, who was the man who had been to see the play the night before and was blown away by it. Gene stood up and shook my hand.

And then we talked for seven or eight minutes. And then Gene said, said all right thank you very much for coming to see us and uh thank you thank you that's that goodbye and uh i left kind of relieved actually that i was out of this weird atmosphere but uh six months later right I was gassed. Did you have misgivings about being this highbrow Shakespearean actor and dipping your toes into network television at the time? I didn't know what I was doing. I'd been in TV. I mean, some of it. I, Claudius, the great BBC series based on the two famous novels, I, Claudius and Claudius the God. I'd been in that.

I'd done a series about a policeman, which only lasted one season. And occasionally little bits of plays would turn up. But it was not a career for me. And I actually wasn't that interested really the theater was what i loved performance being on stage night after night after night and um that changed yeah you really came to embrace every aspect of it yes and i love it today yeah film and television and um i'm worried that I may never get to do it again I think you're going to get to do it

do some more I think you got a little more in you I think when I think about Star Trek you know I grew up with the original Star Trek Captain Kirk, Spock and all of that and yes there is a beautiful optimism to it

perhaps not utopian, but optimistic enough, which I think serves as a contrast to most science fiction. But also, it's always been a show that has been fearless in terms of grappling with social issues. Like that's always been at the core of what the show is about. It gives you an opportunity through allegory to explore things that are going on in culture currently that we're struggling with. I have to say, and this will sound unkind to maybe those who hear this, to maybe those who hear this, working with Gene Roddenberry was not easy.

I mean, he never directed an episode. He was the executive producer. Did every big decision had to get run through him? Oh, yes. As the creator? Absolutely, yes. I was very unconfident. In fact, when I started writing the memoir, I thought,

oh, the people are really gonna want to hear me go on and on and on about Star Trek and maybe X-Men 2 and I don't think I want to that's not the most interesting part of my career I mean that is a shocking thing to say because it's assumed of course that it is and uh i think that uh that throughout that first season i really didn't know what i was doing i didn't understand television technique i'd never had a class in television in my drama school we didn't do film and tv work at all because you know nobody was expected to get it because they were just film actors and there wasn't that much television either.

And then I was determined that I would do better and I knew even when I first saw it that the best thing that I was doing in the first season was Space, the final frontier. That was doing in the first season was space, the final frontier that I got really good at. And why? Because I copied exactly what Bill has said. Bill Shatner.

Bill Shatner. Yeah. Yes. Yes. But the, the, the thing that's striking is when you're on the bridge, there is,

there is a theatricality to that in a very practical sense it is a stage there's a there's entrances and exits and yes you have your you're sitting out you're literally sitting on a throne yes so there are there is a parallel that i imagine as a stage actor you were able to connect with and tap into i mean it's very elizabethan you're absolutely right and um uh it it as it became more and more like that i began to feel more and more comfortable where i my first film was um it's in the book was um two afternoons or two mornings work in a film starring rod steiger rod steiger was one of my childhood heroes i'd seen um the porn the porn broker i'd seen um uh on the water on the waterfront A lot of front, yes, and absolutely loved them. And so learning that this was my first ever day in front of a film camera, he said, what are you doing for lunch?

And I said, I don't know, what do you do for lunch on a film set? He said, you go there and you order your lunch and they'll give it to you. Bring it to my trailer. Wow. Rod Steiger is inviting me into his trailer. The man who said, take the job. Take the job.

Right. In the back of that car with Rod and... Brando. Brando. Yeah. Marlon Brando. But the real kicker to that story though, is it not the fact that you shot that scene, you shot a scene in the back of the car

with Rod Steiger for this movie. Yeah. I think you had to shoot him and they were shooting all of his coverage. Yeah. And then when they finished that, they said lunch and then he threw a fit. Yeah.

Well, they said, what they actually said was they did do all of Bill's coverage, some of which I was in. And then they said, okay, that's all we need of you, Bill. You can go to lunch now. Right.

Rod, you mean. Rod, yeah, Rod, yeah. And we were sitting side by side in the back of this car. I hadn't actually shot him or killed him. No, I didn't get to do that. He said, what about Patrick? And they said, oh, don't worry about that. We'll have somebody read in for you and it'll all be fine. We'll have somebody read in for you and it'll all be fine. And there was a long silence. And I could feel this heat growing on one side of me. And he said, what the fuck do you think I am? I mean, his voice going up.

And then he went for this assistant stage manager and said, think you think i'm gonna leave him now and he's all done my lines and i i'm gonna leave him to do his own and uh and anyway it was it was and then that's when he said i'm sorry about he apologized to me and i said no no no no no that was fine and he invited me to his trailer and uh he said the camera photographs thoughts. No one had ever said that to me before. I mean, that's the very heart of the method, of which he was a pupil. I mean, he studied just like Brando did.

So you carrying that onto the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, that sensibility of the camera can read your thoughts and also a leadership role as the captain sitting in the throne, remembering that Rod Steiger did what he did for this young actor doing his first movie. Like that's a lesson, right?

Like this is how you, this is, you know, it's not right. Like, and if you're the lead in a project, the tone is being set by how you comport yourself, right? And understanding that you're now carrying that responsibility. Exactly, and it's one of the reasons why I love playing the leading role. Yeah.

Because I feel that I can help to give the other actors the best possible experience they could have. And I will always say there are no number one actors. We're an ensemble. We work together. And I do remember one of the things Rod always said, Rod said to me on this lunchtime was, whoever is talking, he's the lead, whoever is. And that was amazing for an actor who only had half a dozen lines.

He didn't have to do that. No, he didn't. He was being kind and generous. Oh, boy. And then you ran into him many years later, right? Years later. And I was in New York. No, I was here in Los Angeles,

and I was, I think, already working on Star Trek. And I went to this restaurant, and we were looking around. It was very busy. And there he was, sitting at a table with three other friends. And I said to Sonny, oh, my God, oh, my God, there's Rod Steiger over there. And she said, go and say hello. Go on.

I said, okay, okay. He won't know who the hell I am. It was years ago. So I went over, and before I got to the table, he said, Patrick, and stood up. And it was one of the best memories of my career. The gift that keeps giving. Yeah, right. Yeah. Beautiful. I need to know about the paranormal activity that was happening in your Silver Lake house that you talk about in the book.

Oh, yeah. Sounds like you were getting visited by ghosts. Oh, yeah. Sounds like you were getting visited by ghosts. Yeah. I bought a house on Moreno Drive in Silver Lake. One evening, I came home. It was, the floors were staggered down a steep hillside. And so the door from the garage led straight into the master bedroom.

And one night, I locked up the car, pulled down the door, opened the bedroom door, and the smell of cooking was intense. And I thought, I must have left the oven on last night or why didn't I smell it? So I hurried downstairs. Nothing. Just the smell of cooking in the air and nothing else at all. And then it took on from there um footsteps on the stairs um voices in rooms where there was nobody uh i came home one day my son had been staying with me he went to school here um and uh i i got home and he said, oh, thank God you're home. And I said, why? Is something wrong?

He said, let me show you. And we went into my sitting room where I had a lot of bookshelves and all the books were thrown across, were scattered across the floor. And I said, what have you been doing? He said, I didn't do anything. I was watching television

and suddenly all these books were thrown into the middle of the floor. Pardon? No earthquake. No earthquake. No. And there was a place in the hallway, which I used to go through the house, starting on the ground floor and then work through my house, turning lights off and all that. Because my television room was right on the ground floor on the the lowest deck of the house and i when i got to the middle floor which was the kitchen the living room and the dining room and

so forth um i walked to the foot of the stairs and just before i reached the stairs i always walked through this icy zone it was just the temperature instantly plummeted and I got to the foot one foot on the step and it was gone I let I rented the house when when after after three years I moved somewhere else um and uh I got a family moved into it and they were lovely people and one day they called me to ask about, I don't know, there was a problem with a washing machine or something that had gone wrong. And so we had a little chat.

And then just as she was about to hang up, she said, oh, by the way, Patrick, there was something I wanted to ask you. You didn't tell us everything that came with your house. They were having it worse than i was and the child exactly on this spot where i used to feel the temperature plummet saw a man standing there and i found out about him i i became very close to my neighbors next door they'd lived there for decades and they said yes yes well that was a man who died in a car accident actually very violent car accident who had lived in that house yes what do you make of

all this well that's only one experience that i've had i've been in other places when i've just had i mean i sunny and i were looking for a house uh in england and um we went into one and it was empty all the furniture had been taken out but it was very very old 15th 16th century and um we were going along there was a long corridor in the upstairs floor and there were doors off all the door, off the corridor into the rooms. And I went into one room and as I got into the middle of the room, I felt hands around my throat and I cried out, help, help. And Sonny came and ran into the room and got hold of me and dragged me out. I was being strangled in that room.

Oh, my God. So it's, and it's, oh, the first time I saw it, I was 12 years old in a neighbor's house. So this is a recurring thing. So this is a recurring thing. I think I have some kind of openness, some kind of sensitivity that maybe it's history. I don't know. But I feel that I do hear voices occasionally. And what do you choose to interpret from that?

What is your sense of? That I'm tuned in to the afterworld. And that there's no mistake or irony in you being an actor who plays a character who goes and visits with aliens all over the galaxy. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there is. I mean, come on. And then you turn on the TV and there's congressional hearings on UFOs and UAPs.

That's right. There's a convergence happening right now. That's right. What is going on, Patrick? There is. It's extraordinary. And things being seen more and more in the sky. I just hope that whatever happens,

happens while I'm still here. Yeah. I gotta let you go shortly here, but there's two more things I wanna touch on quickly. The first thing is, you're a bit of an animal welfare advocate. There's a couple of squirrels that appear and reappear in this book.

You have an incident at a a bullfighting match um that seems like it was impactful and i know you do a lot of work with dogs particularly pit bulls so where does that sense for animal well-being come from i had a dog when my father bought me a dog not long after he came out of the war. The dog's name was Rover and he was a thoroughbred Scottish collie, a Scottish sheep dog. He was black and white, very classical dog. And I loved this guy. He was wonderful. And we had him a long, long time and then he had to be taken and put down. He was wonderful. And we had him a long, long time,

and then he had to be taken and put down. He was very ill. But I never forgot that. And when I was made contact by this Wags and Walks in Los Angeles, it opened all that up again. And so we began fostering dogs, Sonny and myself. And it was wonderful. How many dogs do you have?

I think in total we fostered seven. Only one at a time. Never more than that. I got you. And we only, I mean, the shortest we had one of them was two days. but and we only i mean the shortest we had one of them was two days and um the very first one we had uh was an extraordinary dog beautiful sensitive it would look you right straight into the eyes and cock its head on one side. And I could feel him trying to connect with me, you know? And it's, so I do what I can to help the ones who need help.

And, you know. You've lived just an absolutely extraordinary life. And, you know, you did a wonderful job with the book. It's wildly entertaining. It's a very difficult book to put down. The stories are just absolutely legendary. So well done in that regard. I love it.

And I know you're about to embark on quite the book tour. So you're gonna be doing a lot of media stuff. I guess, you know, I'm curious about what it is that you want people to take from the book, but also just your life. Like what is instructive about the experiences that you've had and the lessons that you've learned as you reflect back as an 83-year-old man on what's important, what's not, and maybe even a guiding principle or two that we could incorporate into

our own lives? Well, they come down to things that i am still working on and it's awkward being a leading actor on television and film but being brave being open being sensitive to other people, tuning into them, becomes more and more and more important to me. And I find that in the close friends that I have, that is their relationship with me too, and it's a wonderful, wonderful experience.

I wish I could go back. There are things I would like to say to my parents and my brothers, both of them, that I never said. And that makes me very, very sad that I never told them what they gave me. But this gives you an opportunity to at least say it publicly. It kind of does, yes. I mean, my first draft of this book was over 700 pages. And it's now about 440. So people are saying, so what are you going to write next?

And I say, no, no, no, no, no. There's no next. This is it. And then the other day I thought, hmm, well, maybe I could find that draft that's got 350 words in it that are not in my book. The director's cut. The director's cut. Yeah. Yeah. Um, to your point, that was beautifully shared. Thank you. Uh, there's a,

a section in the book that, that I found quite moving, which was about your relationship with vulnerability as an actor and how that's a tool and a vehicle for unlocking truth, but also as a way of being in the world, right? The power that comes with allowing yourself to be vulnerable on stage, but also with the people that you care about. Yes, yes, yes. That's perhaps the primary objective in my life now. To be vulnerable with those you care about. Yes. Yes. I think that's a beautiful place to end it. Thank you.

Thank you. So you're an international gift to humanity. I just wanted to recognize you for the work that you do, of course, and this beautiful book that you're putting out into the world. I wish you much success with it, but really how you comport yourself as a man in the world.

Like I find it to be extremely aspirational and the way that you are so open-hearted and earnest with your feelings and your friendships, uh, I think is, is, is, is, uh, is a guidepost for someone like myself. So thank you for that. And, uh, I love, I love having the opportunity to meet you and talk to you. Thank you. I've messed up at times. We all have. And I hold on to them. I don't let them go. I don't let them control me, of course. But they're there. And that was part of who I have been. And in a little tiny way, still is.

So that helps me to reinforce the close relationships that I already have. They're so important. I hope that you can find a little bit more grace and forgiveness for yourself. I think you owe that to yourself. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much for that last comment. Yeah. And with that, I think I have to say au revoir.

Thank you, sir. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com.

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