I only had the privilege of speaking with the great Sir Patrick Stewart one time, on a press day for the final film featuring him as Jean-Luc Picard, 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis. The movie itself was a dog — such an ignoble end to the adventures of the crew from Star Trek: The Next Generation that much of the final season of the recent Star Trek: Picard series was devoted to undoing it. So Stewart and I spent less time discussing Nemesis than reflecting on the apparent end of what had been an improbable 15-year journey for the British actor.
He told me that he didn't expect Next Generation to last for more than a year or two, which was the only reason he took the job in the first place. "There's no doubt," he said, "if I had known it was going to be seven years, I would have been on a plane back to London before you could have said 'William Shakespeare.'"
Shakespeare. Dickens. These were the kinds of classics Stewart had spent his whole life training to play. Star Trek was supposed to just be a lark, and a way to subsidize the sort of work he genuinely cared about. But the thing about Patrick Stewart — who passed away this week at the age of 86 — is that he was incapable of giving anything less than his absolute best. And his absolute best was as good as anyone has ever been on screen, never mind just within the 60 years of Star Trek as a franchise. Even when the material in the first couple of seasons of TNG was clunky, Stewart gave it so much authority, so much gravity, and so much emotional honesty, that the show often worked in spite of itself. And when the writers finally got a handle on Picard and the rest of the crew by the start of the third season, Stewart was able to take what were now very good scripts and take them to places that were genuinely great.