WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 638 - Sir Patrick Stewart

Episode Date: September 16, 2015

Marc and Sir Patrick Stewart together in the garage? Make it so. The cultural icon engages with Marc about his life as an actor, from the English stage to the Starship Enterprise, culminating with his new show Blunt Talk. Sir Patrick also talks about the traumatic events of his childhood and how he turned them into motivation for his activism and charitable work. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Death is in our air. This year's most anticipated series, FX's Shogun, only on Disney+. We live and we die. We control nothing beyond that. An epic saga based on the global best-selling novel by James Clavel. To show your true heart is to risk your life.

When I die here, you'll never leave Japan alive. FX's Shogun, a new original series streaming February 27th, exclusively on Disney+. 18 plus subscription required. T's and C's apply. It's a night for the whole family. Be a part of Kids Night when the Toronto Rock take on the Colorado Mammoth

at a special 5 p.m. start time on Saturday, March 9th at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton. The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5 p.m. in Rock City at torontorock.com. Lock the gates! all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucksters what the fucking ears what the fucking knots how's it going i'm mark maron this is my show

this is wtf the podcast thank you for joining me i appreciate your listenership what yeah i do but why am i sometimes i just talk and i don't even it doesn't i don't realize what i'm saying until after it comes out sounded very professional it was pleasant there was true gratitude there anyway thanks for listening it's amazing show today i had an incredible conversation with sir patrick stewart this is the second uh sir i've had on the show. And equally as amazing a conversation as I had with Sir Ian McKellen not long ago. I was thrilled to have him. And I'm not even that huge. Well, let's be honest.

I'm not a Star Trek guy at all. But I am a Patrick Stewart guy. He's a very impressive character. And it was a very surprising and candid and emotional conversation. I was happy to have him here, and I think you'll enjoy that talk. Listen to me setting up the talk like a professional. I'm going to be in Australia October 15th at Sydney, Australia at the State Theater, October 16th at the Palais Theater in Melbourne, and October 17th at Brisbane City Hall in Brisbane. Please

go to my website WTFpod.com slash calendar for the links to the tickets. If you're in Australia, you're going to be in Australia. I'm excited about those shows and I will be there. Some other bits of business here on the show today.

I can tell you about my personal struggles with my roof and my tools i can do that but i think i need to address a situation that happened in the press and happened to on my phone i got a call a few days ago a text from uh from my friend steve rennazisi he's a comedian and um i thought he maybe i didn't know what it was about i thought he might want to come on and talk about his special turns out it was much more dire i got on the phone with him and uh this was before any news broke and and i said what's up and he goes well look this is uh it's it's about me and uh and uh i need to apologize to you for lying to you.

And I was like, what? And he said, you know, I was on your podcast, and I talked about being in the World Trade Center on 9-11, and I wasn't. And I just, I need to apologize for lying to you. I'm sorry. And it's not true, and I'm just not that guy that does that. And I'm just, I'm coming clean.

And I'm just, I want to apologize to you. And I said, okay, I appreciate that. And, you know, good for you for owning it. But, you know, it hit the news. It was in the New York Times, I guess. And it obviously has gotten traction. And, you know, the podcast that I had him on, that happened, that was almost six years ago. And, you know, that's out there.

So I know some people played that. And, you know, it's been, you know, it's a big deal. And I don't know that he necessarily owed me an apology. I think it's the right thing to do to apologize for lying. But I need you guys to know that this is not 60 minutes. If someone comes on the show and tells a story about their life, I will take what they're saying at face value. If people come on here and make stuff up, I mean, that's on them.

This is obviously going to be a life changer for steve and he's got to live with this that's where that's at i appreciate the apology it was a it was a bad thing to do but uh you know that's on steve now and and and that's you know his cross to bear in his conscience and and he's got to live with the repercussions of what he did and now owning up to it. So that's where I stand on that. So shifting gears, the other day it rained in L.A. I'd like to thank whoever was responsible for that or maybe just the universe or weather patterns or what. But fuck, man, did we need the rain or what?

I think that the structure of my house was literally drying out everything is drying up and the rain comes and i was so thrilled of course to see my new driveway in action to see those drains working to not see sandbags in front of my fucking garage to see my driveway dry and water-free because the drainage system works but i was surprised to wake up the day of the rains to rain in my kitchen water was raining into my kitchen so i was alone in the house it was early in the morning water was pouring into my kitchen. It was raining. The drains were working, but there was a problem, obviously, and that had only happened one time before when the water on my roof got so high because of a clogged, the only gutter I had, there's only one outlet for water up there, and that got clogged, and the water level rose above

the seam of the roof. But it meant that I had to get up on my roof. I had to get on a ladder, seam of the roof, but it meant that I had to get up on my roof. I had to get on a ladder and I can't tell you how much it took, how much personal strength it took, not for me just to angrily climb up that ladder alone with no help, no one spotting me, no one there to see if I fell and cracked my head. Uh, it took a lot. And I think it's a sign of growth that I wasn't so stubborn that I may not be here today, that I wasn't so stubborn that I might, you know, be in a hospital babbling or in a coma. So I would like a little credit and a pat on the back for not being a fucking old, proud idiot and just making it up that ladder in the pouring rain out of anger to deal with that myself and possibly hurting myself. What I did was I sat there and I thought, well, who could come over right now? Who could come over? Who could come over and help me right now immediately because I need help. I called the contractor who did my driveway. I texted him, dude, trouble, water coming in the house.

Didn't hear back from him. Thought maybe Ryan Singer. There's no way that fucker's up at eight o'clock in the morning. Maybe my neighbor. When I go knock on my neighbor's door, how about my girl? How about the woman in my life?

I didn't want to bother her. She's got her own shit going on, making her own house, you know, right, and got her own shit going on making her own house and you know right and doing her own shit but i told her what was happening and i was just going to wait it out i had to get the ladder out she's like i'm coming over so there we were out in the rain in my rain gear her and her hat climbing up the fucking ladder so i got up to the roof and there was about a foot of fucking water sitting up there like a little goddamn lake. And then I released it. I pulled that grate out and just 40 gallons of water just ran through my new draining system. It was exciting. I was happy there was a solution.

So I guess that what I'm telling you is that I think we should all be happy that it's not raining in my kitchen and that I didn't maim myself or lobotomize myself or die by being stupid on a ladder. See that? Maybe it's a lesson story. Maybe. I don't know. Those of you who have been listening for a few years, I think might remember when I fell 15 feet off that ladder onto my back and the

woman I was living with came out yelling and screaming and crying at what an idiot I was. She was just inside. Why didn't I tell her? Oh, because I'm a proud, stubborn old fuck. So learn my lesson.

Okay. Enough said, Oh, I saw straight out of Compton. I thought it was spectacular. I don't do a lot of movie reviews here, but man, here's the deal. I missed that whole thing. I missed it because I remember when it was happening, but I just was not, it was not my music.

It was not my world. I don't know how I missed it, but I missed it. But the amazing thing about going to see a biopic where you know very little about who the bio is of. I mean, I'm obviously unfamiliar with Dr. Dre. I'm familiar with Ice Cube. I didn't know much about Easy. I didn't know anything about any of them. So I didn't really know enough about them to sort of have that feeling where you're like, oh, this does not like the real guy.

It was an amazingly acted movie. Historically, I imagine it's fairly accurate. It was produced by Cube and I think Eazy-E and his widow was involved and Dre was involved. So I just thought it to be an amazingly acted, well-crafted movie. It was exciting. It was compelling compelling i learned things i wanted to go listen to all the music now like that's a beautiful thing about the internet and

about the fact and i'll support this again again there is no late to the party you can just go get that stuff but man the whole life i i just saw it i just thought it was great and i i need to i i really want i want to interview Ice Cube. I mean, out of the whole crew, that guy seemed, the guy who played him was amazing. And the sort of depth that it seemed like that the righteous spirit of the whole undertaking was sort of on his shoulders.

And that whole world of the music business is really new to me uh it shouldn't be uh there's an ignorance to my on my part but um i thought it was fucking exciting and i thought it was a great movie that i guess that's all i'm saying i'm ignorant about rap music and i i love that movie and i learned something and um it was i fucking the the spirit of it was just amazing so now it's my pleasure to uh to to bring to you my conversation with sir patrick stewart uh his show blunt talk his new show airs on saturday nights at 9 p.m on, but you know him from

the other things. He's an amazing guy. So here we go. It's hockey season, and you can get anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So

no, you can't get an ice rink on Uber Eats. But iced tea, ice cream, or just plain old ice? Yes, we deliver those. Gold tenders, no. But chicken tenders, yes. Because those are groceries, and we deliver those too. Along with your favorite restaurant food, alcohol, and other everyday essentials. Order Uber Eats now.

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The first 5,000 fans in attendance will get a Dan Dawson bobblehead courtesy of Backley Construction. Punch your ticket to Kids Night on Saturday, March 9th at 5pm in Rock City at torontorock.com You are the second knight I've had. Indeed. Ian McKellen was here.

That's right. So he was talking about Mr. Holmes. Yes. Yeah, and I think he's brilliant in that film. He was great. I don't know how much we got into that ultimately, but we did talk about Shakespeare. Yes. Yes, because... He knows something about that. He's pretty on top of shakespeare yes yes because uh he knows something

about that he's he's pretty on top of the shakespeare business yes he is and uh i i am one of those people that never really locked into shakespeare why was that because i don't i don't did just i didn't understand it it seemed to take a long time you know and when i saw it it was like i don't know i don't really get it but i'm not diminishing him i'm certainly not going to say that shakespeare was some you know not uh the the greatest writer ever i just i wish i could relate to it more and then he you know we talked about it a bit and then at the end he performed shakespeare to my face directly yeah and he delivered the message i he uh yeah I don't know if that was intention,

but he did something from Thomas More, I guess, sort of which is a little off the beaten path. Oh, yeah, that's an alleged authorship. But he said that was the only one that is in Shakespeare's handwriting, supposedly, in the British Museum, that there was this piece, and it was a monologue about immigrants.

Yes. And he did it looking right at me out of nowhere and i was like all right i get it now i understand and did he do that off book was he yes he was prepared completely he did what a show off but you must have shakespeare monologues in your mind that on hand at will they have been cluttering up my brain for decades. I mean, I can remember speeches that I learned when I was a teenager. Really? Oh, sure. It's all there. And my wife this morning quoted, she quoted something from Hamlet. And, you know, she's a singer, so she's not supposed to know Shakespeare. She got a couple of words wrong, but otherwise it was a very good quote.

And I could add the words that were missing. But, yeah, I have speeches, you know, hours of speeches in my head that just don't go away. There's something about Shakespeare. There's something about the nature of the blank verse. Even his prose, which is a little trickier right but it sticks right and it's almost like a song yes because there is a rhythm right and there there is a tune there is music to write Shakespeare and do you find yourself are you one of those people that can quote it appropriately in conversation, like out of nowhere, and a situation is happening, and you draw in, do you summon Shakespeare into your...

Well, I have done. It's a little bit pretentious, I think, to do that. But I do it in Blunt Talk in episode one. I saw it. I watched it last night. Quoting Hamlet from the roof of my car. And you didn't have to, they didn't have to write that in for you. They did write it in, but it was a line

that I've spoken several hundred times, so I didn't have any difficulty remembering it. You've done Hamlet several hundred times? Performances, yeah. Oh, that's right.

But not playing the prince, playing the king. I never acted Hamlet. It's a disappointment in my life, partly because I feel really ready to do it now. I feel that probably this will be the best time in my life. However, I'm probably about 50 years too old to play Hamlet. But you can interpret Shakespeare how you'd like. Any way you like.

Yes, indeed. I mean, there's been a very notable production in England this past year when Hamlet was played by a beautiful young actress. How was that received? It was received marvelously. A lot of enthusiasm for her performance. So, you know, I wonder sometimes about the radio. Maybe I could come and do Hamlet here. We could do Hamlet. It would be an interesting experiment. It would probably be more comedic. If I did it with you, not really knowing it, that would be the way to do it.

Yeah, I think it would be hugely entertaining. But, you know, we'd need to get a lot of other actors in here because it's a big cast of characters. Well, you can do many voices. You can do all of them. So it could be like a one-man show. Yeah, why haven't you tried that? Yeah, great idea. Because you know who I had in here yesterday?

I had Peter Bogdanovich in here. Did you? Uh-huh. I wish I had known. There was a time I was seeing Peter a great deal. Yeah. We became very friendly. Well, he recalled when I said you were coming, he recalled the performance of your one-man show, the Christmas Carol show. Yeah. We became very friendly. Well, he recalled, when I said you were coming, he recalled the performance

of your one-man show, the Christmas Carol show. Yes. And he said that he had to compose himself after the performance before he met you because he was too emotional

and then he said he could not help but crying anyways. He did. It was a memorable occasion. First of all, I was thrilled to meet him because I've enjoyed his work. Enjoyed. No, no, no. That was thrilled to meet him because I've enjoyed his work.

Enjoyed. No, no, no. That's too light a word. I've loved his work. Yeah. And I was almost ready to leave the theater when he showed up. And it's true. He started to talk about the performance and began to weep.

Yeah. But, you know, the Christmas Carol is a very potent story. It's a very simple story, and often people think of it as just a Christmas story or even just a children's story. But, in fact, it's about redemption. And if you have a life or a history that maybe needs a little bit of redeeming,

then I think Christmas Carol is going to affect you. I need that. I need redeeming. Yeah, we all of us would be helped by a little bit of redemption. Well, what compelled you to, because I didn't really know about that, but that is something that you did, you know, once you got here, right? You were in Los Angeles. once you got here, you were in Los Angeles. Well, it was my response to the growing realization that Star Trek The Next Generation was not going to be the failure that everybody had predicted it would be,

including my own agent. When I balked at the idea of signing a contract for six years, he said, don't worry, don't worry. You'll be lucky to make it through the first season. You cannot revive an iconic show like Star Trek. It's a crazy idea. So, you know, come make a little bit of money

for the first time in your life. Get a suntan, meet some girls. Hollywood, man. Exactly, exactly. Anyway, the story turned out to be very different, and it only underlined what the great William Goldman said about in Hollywood, nobody knows anything about anything. Yeah. And we were a hit.

Yeah. So I knew all of those stories about English actors that had come to Hollywood. Like about who? Like which were the ones that stood out? Well, I mean, English actors, great English actors. Olivier. Richard Burton. Yeah.

Peter O'Toole. Right. Tony Hopkins. Yeah. All actors who came here and didn't come back. Right. You know, I mean, Tony is somebody I miss a great deal so far as his stage work is concerned. But I understand it's a very pleasant life in Los Angeles.

You've grown to understand that? Yes. And even though I was here for 17 years until I couldn't take it anymore and I left. But what I was scared of was that that would happen to me. Right. was scared of was that that would happen to me right and that i would lose my nerve about being on the stage um i'd heard stories from so many actors this had happened you stay away too long and you stage from the stage you can't get back on there well you get a fear i'd imagine indeed exactly that so i was determined this was not going to happen to me.

Right, yeah. So during the second season of Star Trek, after I'd done my laundry on Saturday mornings, which was my system that I had, and I still do my own laundry. I was doing it all day yesterday. It's just a slight obsession. As somebody said to me the other day on the platform of the subway station in Brooklyn, where I live.

Hey, man, you keeping it real? They said to me and lunges. But that's one of those weird things like I, you know, in between these last two interviews, I've embarked on trying to make horchata, the Mexican drink, the rice drink. And there are things that you do that that really sort of grounds you and connect you you know to to just being a person exactly um there is something therapeutic i'm not exactly sure what the nature of that therapy really is but it it um i just like the routine are you do you had are you like a guy who needs to have his things folded a certain way? Yes. Yeah. I wash my T-shirts.

I do underwear, socks, and T-shirts. That's all. Nothing else. Right. So don't think about giving me your shirts to take away with me. You don't want the bag? No, no, no. That I couldn't cope with. But the T-shirts, I have a way of folding them.

And it pleases me. Some people think it's eccentric. Anyway, these weekends in the second season of Star Trek, I spent most of Saturday devising solo shows for myself. I actually created about six of them in a few weeks. And one of them was a version of Christmas Carol. I'd had the idea when my, I used to be a choir boy in my church in England, and they wanted to raise money. I think the organ needed restoring. Which church? Oh, this was called Murfield Parish Church. But it was the Church of England? Yes, Church of England, an Anglican church. And so I said I would put on this performance for them before Christmas, and they pretty much sold out the church. Which was just you?

Just me. And how old were you then? I was in my 40s. Oh, I thought when you were a kid you did it. Oh, no, no, no, no. I was going to say, that's impressive doing all that. I don't think anyone would have come to see me reading a Christmas carol when I was a kid, you did it. Oh, no, no, no, no. I was going to say, that's impressive doing all that. I don't think anyone would have come to see me reading A Christmas Carol when I was a kid. So I did this thing, and unfortunately, I didn't cut it enough.

So the audience sat there for nearly four hours in this rather drafty, gothic Victorian church. But the story got to me. But the story got to me. And when I was thinking about compiling shows that I could easily perform, that I could pack everything I needed into the trunk of my car and take it to a college or a community center, a campus somewhere. And in that way, keep my stage chops in, you know. But you wanted to be a touring act. You were sort of, it's almost like a comedian. Like I can just throw this in the car. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Self-contained, limited lighting. Absolutely. I needed nothing at all, really. Yeah, minimal lighting and some decent clothes to wear, comfortable clothes. That you washed. Yeah, that I'd washed myself. But I took this Christmas Carol idea very seriously. And I remember I cut it properly this time.

I got it cut down. And I wanted to tell a version of the story because it had always seemed to me that the sentimental side of Christmas Carol was what had been emphasized, except in the great Alastair Sims black and white British film version in which he played a real monster, Scrooge. I wanted the piece to be more about what we've been discussing, redemption. So I read it for a group of teachers, professors from the English department at UCLA. I read it one evening on the hearth rug of my friend's house with all of these scholars sitting around me. And they all said, you've got a show there. You know, you should put it together so i i did it with the script in my hand i had piles of script dotted about the stage uh because i i couldn't learn it

it was a two-hour show right but then a good friend of mine said i'm taking you to broadway with this show it's it's it's too good just to be taking around campuses so then you had to memorize it then i had to learn it yes so it was interesting. So you decided to showcase it for academics to make sure you were on the level with it. Yes, exactly. I wanted to have confirmation that what I was doing with the story was not undermining it or was not in some way being disrespectful to what the great Dickens had done. Don't want to diminish Dickens. You don't. At your peril. So they gave me a thumbs up and I went ahead. And then finally I had to sit down and learn 49 pages.

But not unlike Shakespeare. You get the rhythm, I imagine. You do. And it sticks. I mean, I haven't performed this now for many, many years. But, you know, if we had the time, I could start right now. Marley was dead to begin with. There is absolutely no doubt about that. The, you know, and I could go on for that, but I, but you don't want to hear Dickens this morning. Well, I do like the idea

that the fear of not doing stage work and the fact that, you know, when you think about Anthony Hopkins, that you have some nostalgia or melancholy that he's not being what he used to be on stage. Because I have no idea really about Anthony Hopkins on stage, or I have not seen you work on stage either. But there's something, because I just saw some theater recently, and I don't go a lot. And there's something necessary and irreplaceable about the experience as an audience member, as a performer for stage. And I know why it is. audience members and a performer for stage. And I know why it is. It is because unlike television or film, the air that is being breathed in that theater is being breathed by the performer and by the audience too. And the audience become a part of the performance. Sometimes I meet audiences

after a play and they always seem surprised when I insist that they are a very important part of that unique performance because every stage performance is unique yes it nothing is ever simply repeated yeah um you know so many things can affect how you perform how you feel are you well are you unwell did you have a good day have you got a headache did you have enough to eat did you have too much to eat yeah are you awake are you drunk exactly all of those elements have got to be taken into account and so um it it it is a one-off experience and um that's why i think theater has so much power, potential power to change the way people feel. And I do remember a friend of mine coming to see Christmas Carol on when it was on Broadway, one of the occasions. theater by the looks on their faces i knew they were not feeling the same things they had been feeling when they walked into the theater in other words what you did you and dickens between you

had changed them that evening made them think differently about the world and that's the best possible comment you can ever hear about a stage performance and yeah because everyone has their own human experience with it whereas you go to movie, it's a very controlled situation. And most of the time you leave a movie and it's gone. It can be. It can be. I mean, there are movies that stick for me. But it...

I guess I'm talking about a certain type of movie. Yeah, yeah. There is a distancing effect, I find, by film and television. But when you're watching flesh and blood and the actor is experiencing these things and communicating that experience directly in action, live to an audience, it's very potent. But there's a built-in vulnerability to it because it is just flesh and blood up there. And there's a moment, like sometimes just when a play starts, i almost start crying even it doesn't matter what it is really really because you're beginning this this thing with these people and they're people and there's a

lot on the line yes yes yes there's a there's a there's a built-in vulnerability to it no matter what it is and and the key to that i think is is that everything is happening for the first time. Right. It doesn't matter how many performances you've done at the play. When I prepare to go on for the first entrance, I know nothing about the next three hours. My mind is a blank. All I know is that I have one thing that I've got to take one step and walk onto the stage. Then I have a line to speak.

But beyond that, I know nothing. For instance... And you just hope you take off. I mean, you don't want to be thinking about that. If you're thinking about the cues or whatever, you're in trouble, right? Disaster. No, no, no, no, no.

It's, you know, living in the moment, which is a cliche about performance, but it's really, really important. For example, I did a production of that great 20th century American masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee's astonishing play. And that play, the curtain goes up on an empty living room. And then you hear a key being put into a lock. The lock turns, the door opens, and into the living room walk George and Martha. And Martha says her first line.

Well, I asked the set builders if they would put a real lock on the outside and give me the key. Because when I was standing behind that door waiting to begin this three-hour long mammoth of a play, all I knew was I have this key in my hand, I put in the lock, and I turn it. And I don't know anything else at all. It sounds a bizarre way to approach creativity, but it allows you more convincingly to be in that moment, to react spontaneously, not like somebody who has had five weeks of rehearsal

or done 20 performances of it already, but it is literally happening for the first time. Pulls you into the present. Yeah. And it makes it exciting. Yeah. So when, I mean, but when did this all start for you? I mean, where did you grow up exactly?

I grew up in the north of England, in the west riding of Yorkorkshire um and i grew up speaking not just with an accent but speaking dialect we we were um i what does it sound like uh you want an example yeah okay um i would go to a friend's house yeah to see uh if he could come out to play right and i would say to say to him, Atalekinat. What? Atalekinat. Okay.

Atta art thou. Yeah. Because I used thee and thou when I was a child. Really? Yes, yes. It was kind of standard. Thee, that's no good. Yeah.

You know. Atalekinat. Atta art thou or are you. Lakin is a dialect word for playing. actors in the 16th 17th 18th century were known as lakers so lakin can mean acting or it could mean playing soccer so this was just what your family spoke yes yeah and all my friends and all the neighbors everyone around spoke with this dialect so we understood one another it was people from another part of England who's, oh, heaven forfend,

from another country who would be very, very confused by what we said. And this is, are there other dialects in England or is this like? Oh, many, many. And, you know,

there was a dialect expert who identified just in the area where I grew up, five different accents. And what is this? What are these old? These are old English words usually? They are. Yeah. Yeah. As I said, using the word Laker is one of them for player. Middle English would it be? Yes, it will have its roots certainly in Middle English. My mother's sister,

we were a kind of performing family. You were not thought weird or a show-off if at a party or Christmas time you stood up and recited something or sang a song or played a musical instrument. My aunt used to recite this poem every Christmas. She was not an actress. She was not a performer, but it was the same poem. And it started like this. I was sitting by asked in last evening my mother and feather were yoff because they'd yet that me old non susanna well they'd up a bed we a cough she's some brass as me old non susanna that's reason she's looked after sore if they've note where are the note but a bother there's a sample we old uncle jaw now that's how people

talked in my community so i think i understood the first little idea the first sentence if it was slightly dirty you didn't understand no it wasn't dirty you were thinking of the word arson arson is a version of um uh fireplace i was sitting by the fireplace last night i was sitting by arson last evening right arson because it comes from ash and coal where you burn the fire. So that all had to go. I got an acting teacher when I was 12, which is a little bit presumptuous. Do you have other siblings? I had two brothers, two older brothers. And it was my oldest brother who got me interested in Shakespeare because he loved Shakespeare and he would read bedtime stories to me when he was in the RAF, when he came home on leave.

But bedtime stories he wrote, he read to me were Macbeth and King Lear and Hamlet, of course. Heavy to go to sleep to. Yes. I didn't understand very much. But i well a i loved it that my brother was reading to me that was great because he was 17 years older than oh my gosh really and i i i loved the sound of the words yeah but there was a phrase in hamlet he used to love to do hamlet's soliloquies but there was a phrase in the most famous soliloquy of all to be or not to be when Hamlet says, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, you know, when we have ended our life, in other words. Well, in my part of the world, we pronounced coal, C-O-A-L, as coil.

Right. C-O-I-l yeah as coil right c-o-i-l right so when my when my brother read shuffled off this mortal coil yeah i heard shuffled and thought well he must mean shoveled so it's a line about somebody shoveling coal right and i believe that until I was well into my teens. It's like not knowing the lyrics of a song and you say them wrong. Well, for example, let me give you another instance of that because it'll give you an idea of how I was brought up and lived. My brother and I listened to the radio and every Saturday morning there was a record program for children called Children's Choice. And you would write in requesting it for a birthday, for a friend who was sick. And often the songs would be repeated.

So we learned the lyrics of all of these songs. But there was one Dean Martin song. Oh, yeah? And we heard him sing it many times, and we learned the lyrics. And I thought it went, When the moon hits your eye like a big piece of pie. Sure, sure.

But it's not big piece of pie. No, it's pizza. But why was a big piece of pie. Sure. But it's not big piece of pie. No, it's pizza. But why was I singing piece of pie? Because I didn't know what a pizza was. I'd never seen a pizza. Right. Never heard of them. Sure.

It was something completely foreign. So we decided he must be singing rather clumsily piece of pie. Right. And the other incident is you were really too young to even probably take in the idea of the mortal coil. Exactly. Exactly. If you knew what that meant, it would probably be disturbing. It would have been disturbing, confusing. So I happily settled for shoveling coal rather than talking about the necessary end to life.

So your oldest brother was 17 years older? Yeah. And the middle brother was how many years older? Five. Oh, okay. So the first one was like a long time before. Oh, yeah. And because my father got my mother pregnant and immediately joined the army and didn't marry her and went off. And he was actually stationed in India with the British Army in India, the Raj, all through the 20s and early 30s. Then after 10 years, he came home and he married her. And that was during World War II? That was between World War I and World War II.

Yeah. But, of course, he was old enough to be conscripted during the—my eldest brother was, so he was in the RAF for his war years. What year, what war was that? That would be the Second World War, 1939 to 1945. Really? He was old enough to be in the RAF, and of course my father was away at the war all the time. I had an idyllic first four and a half five years of my life born in 1940 thinking

i've because i worked out the dates because i know when he left home to go into the army your father or your brother my my father yeah i was probably conceived on his last night in england right oh last night as a civilian sure it it out properly. And so for the next four years, I lived with my mother and my brother, and we had a happy, idyllic life. And then this big man suddenly showed up when I was four going on five and changed everything for us. That you knew from pictures. Only from pictures, yeah. And, of course, he was wearing uniform. And he finished his Army career as a superstar. He was regimental sergeant major of the parachute regiment he was he was an airborne

division and as such had a very very important job uh-huh and and you you've spoken about him uh publicly a lot and he came home a volatile person. Yes. And I didn't know this until a very few years ago that they called it shell shock in those days. His experiences in 1940 with the British Expeditionary Force, when we first invaded Europe after the outbreak of war, it was a disaster. It went horribly wrong. And what led to the evacuation of the British forces from

Dunkirk. In fact, my father was in Cherbourg. He was on the last ship to leave Cherbourg for England. And the Nazis were already in the suburbs of the town when his boat actually sailed. So he was very fortunate to get out. Otherwise, he'd have spent those four years in a prison of war camp. So he saw a prison of war camp so he saw a lot of action in other words he saw a great deal of action yes and once he joined the parachute regiment which he did i think in 1942 uh he jumped into action i think four times i mean into action meaning that he his parachute opened and he was being shot at so to find a definition for whatever you experienced,

how were you framing it before you were able to be sympathetic to how you were brought up? I mean, to deal with post-traumatic stress and to see it that way, I imagine it created an empathy that you didn't have before. It certainly did, a huge empathy, because I have talked publicly for a number of years now, for a long time I couldn't, about the violence in my home. My father proved to be a weekend alcoholic. So the weekends were dangerous times. whatever he'd been in a good mood and that was lovely and we could all have a good night's sleep sometimes he would be ill-tempered and and it could lead to blows and uh police to everybody

in the family or no no no only my mother he never never struck myself or my brother um and so when i became active in the world of um violence issues, I joined one brilliant organization in England called Refuge, which provides safe houses for women and children. Two women in the UK die every week at the hands of a partner, lover, husband. The figures are terrifying. And so my father got a very, very bad press for a very long time. And then I learned this thing about him suffering from PTSD in 1940, which was never treated. There was no treatment for it. Just man up. Exactly. Be a man. Pull yourself together and be a man.

That's all the help he would have been given. And when I talked to an expert on PTSD and I told him about my father what I've been doing for the memory of my mother. And I joined another organization called Combat Stress, which specializes in providing care for veterans who suffer from PTSD. It's amazing work. And it's beautiful that you're doing that. I can't see. I can't even imagine what that turn must have been and how much. Because, you know know everyone has problems yeah well most people have problems with with their parents I think and and something

so dramatic that is so traumatizing for so long to find relief from that just by having a different way of looking at it yes it it it was a very emotional moment because I was given this news on camera they were filming me for a program called who do you think you are yeah and uh it's a wonderful bbc program where they they they look at a person's life and history and ancestors and choose someone if there is someone interesting to find out about and to take the living subject person back on a journey into the life of this ancestor. Like this is your life kind of thing.

Yes, exactly. In my case, to my astonishment, because they tell you nothing in advance, the cameras began rolling and I realized it was my father's life they were going to examine. And I wasn't sure I wanted to do that. But were you, was he alive? No, no. Now, how old were you when he passed? I was in my late 30s.

Were you guys able to have a relationship? Yes. But it was not a very sustained one. Because of the anger. Yes, yes, indeed. It was difficult being in his company and okay so you so you're on the show and and they say it's going to be your father's life no they don't say that they just left it up to me to work it out oh my god um and and they just read start reading

you stories yes that's right in this case it it was about my father's military history. We were in the War Museum in London. And they tell you nothing, you see. And I've been advised, pack a bag for a few nights away, put in some wet weather gear, and bring your passport. weather gear, and bring your passport. This was when I went to do this interview at the Imperial War Museum. Well, then we got into a car when the interview was over, and it was only by looking at the road signs I realized we were going to Portsmouth. And I thought, aha, we're going to get on a ferry and go somewhere. I didn't know where we were going. In fact, we went to France, and the next morning I was standing on a spot by a railway line where the military historian I was with told me my father would certainly have stood because they knew exactly what happened to the train that he was on outside a French town called Abbeville. Did they know what happened in your family? I don't think that particular man did know but later on i was to meet someone who did and he was the one who showed me this newspaper cutting that

that uh corporal alfred stewart had returned home severely shell-shocked um i don't know even if my mother ever knew that but certainly the boys we we we didn't know that he was suffering and i was assured nothing would ever have got better from for him all his life he would have stayed with the trauma of that those experiences because what happened to him when they were outside abbeville um they were bombed and strafed and shelled they They had to abandon their train, and then they had to walk back to Cherbourg from where they were. It was a long hike. And along the way, there were all kinds of horrific incidents of columns of refugees and civilians just being gunned down on the highway from planes attacking them. A lot of this my father would have witnessed and experienced, and it left him marked for life.

You know, it's sad, but it's an amazing gift that you were able to be given this new information. Yes. I can't imagine the unburdening to let go of some of that anger. Yes, and that was most important because anger is a bad thing to hold on to. It's cancer. But yet it also left me feeling that I should find some way of making it up to him. I'd told these public stories about what he did and how he behaved. Without being sympathetic.

Yeah, exactly. And now I can now put it in a context. My father was sick. He was ill and didn't know. Without being sympathetic. Yeah, exactly. And now I wanted to, I can now put it in a context. My father was sick. He was ill and didn't know what he was doing. Had no control over what he was doing. That doesn't mean to say that I condone the violence. Violence is never a solution to anything.

And this is why a fairly recent movement in this area is saying domestic violence is not a woman's issue. Yeah. It's a man's issue. Yeah. Okay. There are some women who beat up their husbands. That does happen. It's very rare.

And also it's weird with domestic violence because there's this weird stigma around it. Other people aren't supposed to get involved. They don't get involved. Exactly. Exactly. And it's humiliating and embarrassing for everyone. Yeah. And that was one of the things I struggled with as a child was the sense of shame I carried with me.

Because when fights arose in my house and there would be yelling and so forth, things being thrown, we lived in a community where people were cheap by jowl. And so everyone would hear that. In fact, we had a wonderful neighbor. Her name was Lizzie Dixon. And Lizzie Dixon worked in a weaving shed and had done all her life. And she was a big, powerful woman. And I do quite clearly remember one night her throwing our front door open. We never locked our doors. Throwing the front door open when my father was in one of his rages and standing in front of him and raising her fist in his face and saying, come on, Alf Stewart, you try it on me. Let's see how far you get with that. Come on, have a go at me because she would have flattened him. There's no doubt about that.

Great, great woman. I wish I could meet her again to say thank you to her because she often stepped in and stopped things from getting worse. Really? A lot. But it was embarrassing. It was humiliating. And there's no consistency in the house. You don't know. No.

There's no way to define love. No. Because, you know, who is he going to be? Yeah. It was truly chaos. And when you look back at your creative career, you know How do you frame that like, you know your desire to act in in relation to that emotional situation? Well, thanks to my 17 years living in Los Angeles and some expensive but high quality therapy I have been able to put those pieces together.

I think the initial attraction to me of being an actor was that I could avoid being myself. I could be someone other than Patrick Stewart, and in a different environment from the one that I lived in. And from the first moment that I ever walked on stage in front of a darkened auditorium with a couple of hundred people sitting there, I was never afraid.

I was never fearful. I didn't suffer from stage fright because I felt so safe. On that stage, I wasn't Patrick Stewart. I wasn't in the environment that frightened me. I was pretending to be someone else. And I liked the other people was pretending to be someone else and i liked the other people i pretended to be so i felt nothing but security from being on stage and i think that's what

drew me to this strange job of playing make-believe which is what we do it's it's interesting to me because when i spoke to to sir ian you know and you are friends, like he was able to sort of identify that the shame he felt from being closeted, it did not able him to have an emotional life. Yes, yes. So he could play these parts where he had a full emotional life. I have heard Ian talk.

We have shared our experience, of course. We shared a dressing room for six months when we were doing Waiting for Godot. And we talked often about these things. It's, for instance, I could not act anger for many, many, many years. Because you were too afraid of it? Exactly. Wow.

I was fearful what might come out if I really, because as an actor, you tap into real experiences, real emotions. You know, we have this life experience, which only builds and builds and gets more and more profound with each year that you live. And nothing is ever wasted on an actor. No experience is ever wasted because you store it away it goes into this bank account of experience and then you want to uh you want to be thought to be uh having a true a genuine an authentic experience yeah on stage you tap into those

things that will help you to provide that, to give the appearance of authenticity. And I couldn't do it. I faked anger for years and years and years and years. And indeed, the directors would say to me, that's not quite working. Can we find another way you could do it? It's getting stuck somewhere. Well, of course it was.

Well, to be witness of real unbridled rage, you must have been terrified of what was in you. You had to assume on some level that part of your father was in you. I know and I knew what was in me. It was many of the same things that my father felt. I know that now without doubt. I have occasions, very rare now, because I like to think that I am more understanding of myself and more in control of myself. I like to think that I can go into a place of anger, of rage, of fury, and contain it to the character that i'm playing and not let it break out because in my ordinary private life there have been moments it happened with a paparazzi

a few months ago really yeah just a few months ago just a few months ago this incident lasted seconds but you felt it i was shaking from what I had done and ashamed that I had lost control. Even though it had worked and I got into the safety of my car with a driver, I had let myself down. But it happened so fast. Scary. There was no opportunity to say, I'm feeling this. I'm going to get control of it. I will not let go.

No, it was totally impulsive. There was no reasoning behind it. I did not prepare myself for that. It happened to me as if it was happening to somebody else. And that's the scariest part of rage. Yes, it is. Oh, my God. And you feel like it's a possession.

And then there's that immediate moment where you're like, oh, my God, my fucking father. Yes, absolutely. And they put the wiring in why it makes sense yeah and then the shame comes back oh so uh when i played macbeth a few years ago we did it as a sort of cold war production it was set set uh as if it might have been in a Soviet satellite country, you know, after the Second World War. And I'd rehearsed this for six or eight weeks. But it wasn't until the first dress rehearsal when I was in my military uniform with a forage cap on my head. And I had a little ritual. My dresser would stand by the dressing room door and hand me an AK-47, which I took on stage with me, tucked under my arm.

And she would give me this thing. And I turned to look in the mirror. I'd grown a mustache for this role. And I don't know why. I mean, a mustache on Macbeth, it sounds a little bit weird. I don't know why until I looked in the mirror to check that I had everything I needed. And my father was looking straight back at me. I'd actually created him.

It's interesting that I wasn't going to play a good guy. I was playing one of the worst monsters in drama, Macbeth. And I had made myself look like my father. And there had been no conscious, rational choices behind those decisions at all until I saw what I looked like in the mirror. And did you find that you were able to process anything in those performances? Very much so. Yes. Very much so. Because I knew then that I could let the rage, the fury, the violence out authentically, and nothing bad would happen to me. In fact, I would be helping myself because it is therapeutic.

Absolutely. And how were those performances received? Pretty well. Yeah. We opened that production in Chichester, down on the Chichester Festival Theater. It was so successful, we transferred to the West End of London. That was so successful we took the show to Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York and that sold out before we got off the plane that the equity very very kindly allowed us to transfer the whole production to Broadway where we played another 12 weeks. So

you might say that my father had some hand in making that production such a success because when my son's mother-in-law came to see it in New York, they live on Long Island, my son and his wife and her parents were going to come backstage. My daughter-in-law's mother refused to come backstage. She said, no way am I going back to meet that guy. She had met me before and we got on very well. She said, you'll find me in the bar across the road. She went in there to have a drink to get Macbeth out of her system. That's fascinating, man. So you've been here, you were in Hollywood for 17 years and you made a choice to move. You were brought here on an opportunity.

Yes, exactly. So before that happened, you were just primarily a stage actor, and you'd done television in Britain and some movies. I'd done some television, not a lot, and I had appeared in quite small roles in some movies. My biggest break that I got while I was still living in England was to be cast in David Lynch's movie, Dune. And that was, I guess, the first time that anything that I had done had

really been seen in the United States. And so where were you in terms of your attitude about acting? Were you comfortable? Were you happy to be, was your career okay? Yeah, it was. And it was not long before that that I had had this kind of epiphany as a result of a conversation that I had had with a director who was about to direct me in a show.

I was going to play a character called Leontes in The Winter's Tale. This is another macbeth type he's a very very bad man i mean he kills his own son he kills his wife a horrible man and this director said to me i can i want you to do this because i think this man actually exists inside you. Now, I had never talked to him about the things we have been talking about. But this man was a director and a psychologist, in fact. Oh, really? And he said, when you do this role, I want you to tap that Leontes which already exists inside of you. And I said, whoa, I don't think I can do that.

He said, listen, you do this. Trust me, and I will always be at your side. Nothing bad will happen to you, because if you fall, I will catch you. I mean, that's an incredible statement for a director to say. But I believed him and trusted him. So I went on stage, and I played this monster. A friend of mine, an English professor at UCLA, came to see it several times and actually said to me, you would have had more success in this role, Patrick. I had a modest success with it, but you would have had more success if we had not felt we shouldn't be watching. That what was happening to you was too private, too internal, too exclusive, too shocking to reveal. He said,

all the time I was watching you, I wanted to look away. Really? So I put that down as a success. Sure. And from that moment on, I couldn't fake it anymore. Yeah. Because I'd had the experience of tapping my own feelings and exposing my own feelings and i wasn't going to go back to fakery it's it's it's it's interesting to me that that now with that with blunt talk and you know i know jonathan ames i know a couple of the writers at duncan birmingham used to write for my show that it seems that after years of uh of doing you know picard and then after years of doing Picard and then years of doing Professor Xavier, that these are relatively controlled people as characters. They're grounded. They're intense.

They're leaders. But they are in control of themselves. Right. And now Blunt is sort of this exciting comedic opportunity. He's a flawed character. He's been married several times. You've been married a few times. I imagine as the series goes on,

we'll meet those wives and we'll get more of that backstory. We meet the most recent wife in this first season. And I'm looking forward to meeting Walter's first wife because I've got a good idea who I would like to play that.

An English actress I admire very much and it would be fun to have her on the show. But at the moment, we've met two sons, ages about 40 years difference in their ages, a five-year-old and a 45-year-old. Actually, I can talk about it now, played by my son.

Oh, good. My own son, plays Walter's son. Has your relationship now, you by my son. Oh, good. My own son. Plays Walter's son. Has your relationship now, you're on your third wife, right? Can we rephrase that a little bit? I'm sorry. You're married to the woman you love. Yeah, there you go. Okay.

I knew you could do it. You're on your third wife. Have you finally found happiness? Indeed, I have, yes. Oh, yes. So we've reframed that. And you have two children or three? I have two children, four grandchildren.

From my first wife. Yes, yes. Now, if it's not too personal, in the course of their upbringing, now, I don't know, how did your, like, we've talked about your father a little bit, but he obviously lived long enough to see you work. He did. And he came to see me a lot. I think he was quite proud of what I was achieving when I was in regional theater. And then particularly when I joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. And he saw me there many times.

And was there a resistance to the pride at first? And then finally you felt, did that mean something to you, with your anger that that this man was so impressed with you it did mean something to me yes meant a great deal to me I think at first he thought that there was this enthusiasm for acting and then wanting to become a professional actor was was pretty silly. You know, nobody in my family had ever become an actor. You know, they worked in factories, in industry. They went down the coal mines, you know.

But when he saw that I was making a career of it, albeit a modest career, I was out of work for three weeks when I left drama school, and then I got a job as an acting ASM in Weekly Rep, a different play every Monday night. I was never out of work again for about 18 years. I worked continually. And I think this impressed him because my father had a terrific work ethic. And he could see that i could make a living i i could afford to get married i could buy a house i could educate my children and this was all through this peculiar job that i chose to do and i think i think he felt real pride about my achievements i wish very much both my parents could have seen my Star Trek experiences

because I think my father would have appreciated Jean-Luc Picard and I think he would have been happy to see that I could make something of a military figure and give him a three dimension, which perhaps he did not think be capable of. And to be aware that suddenly, and it was suddenly, it was overnight, my reputation, my status as an actor went from, well, if you didn't go to the Royal Shakespeare Company or occasionally watch obscure

programs on the BBC, you never heard of Patrick Stewart. And then Star Trek came along, and it became a worldwide phenomenon. Not me, but the series did. But you as well. To an extent, yeah. So your father never saw the roles where you tapped the fury of him? No. So I guess my question is, and we'll talk about bacardi because i don't want i obviously

haven't been finding we could probably talk for a long time the i guess along the personal lines were there how was your relationship with your sons was it touch and go did you find that you were still battling the ghost of your father and bringing these kids up um occasionally yeah i have a son and a daughter. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. And I remember only once feeling violent towards my son. And he had some irritating habits as a child. One of them was that when he came home from school, when he was a teenager, he would make himself cups of tea and then take a pot of tea upstairs he had a little like bed sitting room at the top of the house and he would start doing his homework he was

he was very rigorous about that um but he never brought the cups back down and i would go to the cupboard eventually and it would be bare empty nothing to drink a cup of coffee or coffee. And I would go up to his room and there would be 25 mugs all with scum on them. Half drunk cups of tea and coffee and, you know, with the stuff growing in them. So this had happened once and I did grab him by the front of his shirt and shake him. But that as bad as it got. I was so irritated. know what he still does that thing today so uh but we have a fantastic relationship when I was arriving outside your front door it was my son I was talking to on the phone because uh we we had a great time when he

came here to to be in Blunt Talk and we're hoping that there will be more appearances for him great so the opportunity to do star trek it was a fluke in a way the way you've described it you're like you'll just get in and out we'll make a few bucks and then it became sort of a defining uh role for you like you are associated with it forever you go to comic-con and people want they they expect that they expect expect Picard stories and they want, you meant a lot to a lot of people. I'm not a Trekkie, so I don't have the depth of what you must witness all the time. That's all right. Don't feel bad about that. But, and then the X-Men franchise is also a huge thing.

It's very funny to me that you and Sir Ian McKellen have these recurring roles in these fantastic franchises. You must sit with each other and go like, it's fucking believable. Exactly that. We would often sit in our trailer when we made the first X-Men movie saying, how did this come about? How did it happen? I'll tell you how it came about. about and and i think the fact that the two of us and other actors who have come into this uh into this genre um spend so much time on a stage with heightened language in our mouths playing kings emperors sure uh tyrants villains uh clowns whatever and and so we fitted very comfortably into the world of fantasy and

science fiction because we'd already been in it for a long time right and that there is uh there is something heightened about both um star trek and x-men something that's not totally 100 real there is a there is of course a theatricality about it shakespearean yeah absolutely shakespearean i've i have and greek as well yeah i do remember the day sitting on the bridge of the enterprise very late one evening and and uh looking at the set and suddenly realizing maybe the reason i am so comfortable on this set is that actually it represents an Elizabethan theater. You know, there are entrances downstage left and downstage right. There are entrances upstage left, upstage right. even a raised area because in the original globe or or the playhouse they had a raised balcony at the back where they could play scenes that that were either you know meant to be elevated or they

just wanted to separate them from the rest of the action that i had been inhabiting this uh this spaceship bridge without realizing that in fact and and what about the captain's chair? Right. It's a throne. Of course. I mean, I had two chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I had one ex-president and one secretary of state say to me, oh, and one astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, say to me, can I sit in the chair? It had such a such a reputation.

And yes, Ronald Reagan came on the set and asked, may I sit there? Of course he did, the old actor. Yeah, of course. And he looked great in that chair. So, yes, we even had a throne. And once early on in the series when I was getting very irritated at the inference made by numerous journalists that given my Royal Shakespeare Company Shakespeare

background that I was somehow slumming do you know what I mean by that yeah I was going down market selling out but but is selling out by appearing in a syndicated science fiction what they expect you guys to do well no we're just but so I turned on this journalist and i said listen understand one thing yeah all those years of sitting in all those thrones of england was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the connotations of a throne. And again, I'd been doing this for a long time without realizing it. And can I tell you one other thing?

Of course. There are no pockets in spacesuits. None. Yeah. And all those years of wearing tights and hose, doublet and hose, no pockets at all. You can't put your fags in there or your lighter or your change for the telephone. Not at all. I guess there was no reason to carry things in space.

It didn't fit on the belt or whatever. Certainly not on the Enterprise. All you had to do was ask the computer for something and you got it. Certainly not on the Enterprise. All you had to do was ask the computer for something and you got it. So, you know, it's one of the things I say to student actors, try not to put your hands in your pockets when you perform. Because it actually, it doesn't seem convincing. It's relaxing to you, but actually it has an artificial look about it.

Artificially relaxed. Way back in 2000. Yeah. That you remember the presidential election of 2000, weren't you? Well, I had been introduced to the vice president when he was vice president at an event at the White House. I was able to have a little conversation when he was campaigning for the presidency in 2000 about his physical presence when he was giving speeches on stage. Vice President Gore had a habit of putting one hand in his pocket and gesturing with the other one. And then taking that hand out of his pocket, putting the other hand in his pocket and gesturing with this hand. And he, bless him, he listened. I said, don't do it.

It looks insecure and weak. The strongest thing that you can ever do when you're facing it is just let your arms hang by your sides. Because apart from anything else, it's showing how relaxed you are. Not stiff, but relaxed. But it is also making you look vulnerable. And for a politician, that's a good thing. I don't think you told him in time. He crept up behind me at an event a few years ago and tapped me on the shoulder and said,

if I had listened more to you, things could have been very different for me. He's a very delightful man. And the relationship with McKellen got stronger recently, right? You guys were not friends necessarily in England, or you were? Oh, not friends, no. Ian, you must understand, was a star from the beginning of his career. He was marked for stardom when he was still at Cambridge University. He was giving outstanding performances then.

I saw him work as a young actor. was giving outstanding performances then I saw him work as a young actor I was astonished by his versatility and range and and uh uh and excitement that he brought to his stage performances and furthermore I knew I couldn't do what he was doing he was better than me and would always be better than me so I was just a distant fan then we worked on a stage production together we only did a handful of performances of a new tom stoppard play and i saw him in close-up well that only just cemented even further what i felt about him and i was a little intimidated by him he was very i'd had no education ian says that i'm obsessed with my bad education because i always bring this up i

left school at 15 he went to cambridge university. So I always kept a distance from him until there we were in adjoining luxury trailers in Toronto filming the first X-Men movie. And as with films like that, you know, you spend much more time in your trailer than you do on set acting because setups take so long. so long and so we hung out in one another's trailers and in conversations began I think to realize how much we had in common how many things our love of Shakespeare of being in the Royal Shakespeare Company the actors the other directors we admired the things that we like to do the things we had a great deal so you learned all on the job. Yeah. That's amazing. It's really profound. And so you and Ian developed this relationship, and that's where your both being in Godot happened. It is. Ian was always going to do Waiting for Godot

with this wonderful director, Sean Mathias, and they met to have a conversation. So who should play the other tramp? And it was Ian who said, I think you should ask Patrick Stewart to do it. And I was asked. I said yes instantly because it's a great legendary play. And the two characters are on stage for the entire play.

And much of the play is a duologue between the two of them. So the idea of sharing the stage in a Sam Beckett play with Sir Ian McKellen was irresistible. But Ian said to me, I think before we began rehearsals, one day we were talking about what was coming up and he said, you know, I don't think this play would work

if every night we meet for the first time that day on stage. I think we have to begin the play at least 45 minutes earlier. I think we should share a dressing room. Well, by then we were both actors of a certain status who expected to have their own private dressing room. So this was a very unusual thought of his. But he was absolutely right. Those two tramps have been together been friends for over 50 years there's a line in the play yeah oh i don't know over 50 years and um ian was

perfectly right the audience had to believe that this was a 50 year old relationship so he shared a dressing room so we shared we shared a dressing room and with all that that means. Yeah. You know, it's a little bit like a marriage. Uh-huh. That's fascinating, man. And it paid off. It paid off so well that it meant by the time Ian said his first line, nothing to be done, and I responded, I'm beginning to come around to that idea myself. We had already had dialogue. Right.

self um we had already had dialogue right and and whether if it was just recounting what we'd done during the day and we'd looked into one another's eyes and you know we'd got dressed we got dressed together we put all this crap that we had to wear all the time because we were dirty old tramps and making ourselves look as horrible as possible um so the play was already underway oh that's amazing but it wasn't written by Samuel Beckett all right I know you got to go do Corden so let's I got two more things I want to just first the it seems like Walter Blunt and Blunt talk is is in your mind is it a I imagine you're up against the typecast of of Picard to degree, that there's an expectation of it, that you're embedded in the global imagination as that guy. Yes, and sometimes just in a professional imagination,

I'm trying to persuade a director several years ago that he should have me in his film playing a very nice supporting role. I've been campaigning for this role, and we had a great meeting. It went so well, and he said to me you know you're a terrific actor um i i really enjoyed meeting you but why would i want jean-luc picard in my movie that's hard yeah you know there's almost nothing you can do about that right but

now this is like very different from picard he's a very you know earthly being a very sort of flawed and exciting character so that must it must be exciting to play it's so exciting and uh perhaps most of all because i'm having to think a little differently the work the preparation is always the same it's consistent with with how i work to get the most out of a role. But now there is that question you have to ask is, and where is this funny? So you've done all the other work, but now there's an extra layer,

an extra element of performance or of behavior that you add on top of that that stops something from being just stupid or melodramatic or unbelievable and becomes funny right and you're working with comedic actors oh well in in blunt talk i mean yeah all of them far more experienced than i am right in playing comedy it's great i mean we have richard lewis on the show for instance i've watched him he's been in here yeah has he oh sure playing a freudian analyst and he did anybody Oh, sure. Playing a Freudian analyst.

Anybody was born to play a Freudian analyst. But it's interesting for a guy that's built an entire career being the patient to switch seats like that. Because I watched that first episode and part of the second one, and he really did a controlled performance. Oh, terrific. He removed some Lewisness and sort of locked in. Yes. That's an excellent way I put it.

Lewisness was taken out of it. And I look into his eyes and I think, I could trust this guy. Not that I wouldn't trust Richard Lewis. Sure. Maybe I should reconsider that statement. Right. But trust him to listen to you. That's a unique thing for Richard.

Indeed. So the other question i have before we wrap it up is what was your experience being knighted oh it was it was exciting were your parents either alive no no they they i i was fortunate to my astonishment uh came uh came in a brown uh plain envelope except it said on the top of it uh uh cabinet office cabinet office and it had been sitting in a plastic bag with a lot of other mail that had been in a closet of a motel where I was filming for about 10 days. Wow. And I had forgotten that I put this bag of mail in there. And very early one horrible cold November morning, I realized I've got a few minutes. I should look through this.

And there was this letter cabinet office. What the heck is this? I opened it up and it said, we are pleased to tell you that and i remember you think they'd special deliver that wouldn't you wouldn't you yeah you know some kind of their regular post somebody in some fancy uniform right you should have brought it to me um no it came by the mail i don't think it was stamped however okay i think letters from the cabinet office go for free and um i remember staring at the brown wall of this motel room in complete disbelief that this had happened. I couldn't take in the news that, you know, when I was a young actor, I admired, beyond words, Sir Alec Guinness, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Cedric Hardwick. These were all people that were heroes of mine.

And suddenly I was being asked, do you want to join them? Yeah, that's amazing. And what I wanted to do was to rush on the set that morning because we were shooting the big dinner party scene in Macbeth. We filmed Macbeth as well. And say, guys, you'll never believe what's happened. But you're not allowed to do that. Until the ceremony?

No, you mustn't speak about it at all. Ever? I mean, there are stories that people who have kind of, you know, telegrams to, spilt the beans, have found that actually they didn't get it after all. Really? Yeah, yeah. So did you, the ceremony with the Queen, was that? It was the

Queen that I got my OBE from the Prince of Wales. I got the knighthood from Her Majesty. And that was an especial pleasure. And she was so impressive. She gave out 100 awards that morning. She was on her feet. I think she was 86. She was on her feet for the entire hour. She spoke a few sentences to each person receiving an award and was absolutely delightful. But it all kind of happened in a bit of a blur. The only thing that I was obsessed with was that I wouldn't fall over because you have to walk backwards away from her. After the night, the sword, the sword on the two shoulders, and then the ribbon around the neck, and then standing up in a brief conversation.

And then you have to take three paces away from her while still facing her. And you're on the top of some steps, you know. So my horror was that I would fall backwards down these steps. A lifetime in theater, and you get three steps. Yeah. I mess up the stage management of it. It's beautiful. Now, did your mother, would she live long enough to see you work?

Yes, she did. She did. They died only two years apart. And my mother, I know, was proud because she told me. And she loved that I was having success and that they both of them were pleased that I was actually able to have a quite comfortable life. I'll say. Congratulations. Thank you. Great talking to you. And you. Thanks very much, Mark. What an honor to have that guy. Just a solid guy and thoughtful and amazing. The idea of being given the opportunity and taking it

to find empathy and love in your heart for a sort of injury that lasted that long, his relationship with his father. It's just a, what a phenomenal turn of events. Really a great experience to talk to Sir Patrick Stewart. Thank you. Boomer lives! Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations,

how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. Calgary is an opportunity-rich city home to innovators, dreamers, disruptors, and problem solvers. The city's visionaries are turning heads around the globe across all sectors each and

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