The beloved actor discusses his new memoir and his journey from poverty in Northern England to interstellar stardom
Although Sir Patrick Stewart’s new memoir takes its title from a trademark saying of his TV alter ego, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Making It So is far from a glib collection of behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Rather, it’s a thoughtful, probing, sometimes explosively funny chronicle full of hard-won insights on class, craft, art, and ambition from an actor who, after 16 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, hit warp speed with Star Trek: The Next Generation—and then kept on exploring. As an author, he comports himself nearly as well on the page as on the stage. “I had one objective only,” says Stewart, 83, calling from Los Angeles. “I wanted the book to sound like my voice. I wanted to give the impression that there was a group of friends and me sitting around the fire, with glasses of wine in our hands, and I was the only one talking.”
This cozy all-night chat takes us from the poverty of Stewart’s early life in working-class Yorkshire, England, where he grew up with no indoor plumbing and shared a bed with a brother until age 14, to a star-crossed middle-school encounter with The Merchant of Venice, to the struggles and lucky breaks that came together to form the long arc of his development as an actor. Throughout, Stewart renders kind but unsentimental judgments on his and his colleagues’ efforts, gives candid estimations of his own successes and failures as a husband, a father, and an ensemble member, and shares memories of singular brushes with the likes of Vivien Leigh, Paul McCartney, and King Charles. (One of the more memorable encounters comes when a fellow cast member of David Lynch’s Dune introduces himself as Sting; as Stewart, a classical-music aficionado, understood it at the time, he played bass guitar in some sort of… police band?) In Making It So, Stewart’s warm, expansive tone feels inclusive—of any actor or genuine creative person—in a way that it’s hard to imagine a younger author pulling off quite so naturally.
I think most Americans who’ve heard you speak assume you must have a doctorate in English literature or some equivalent—so it’s jarring to read you describe yourself as uneducated in the early chapters of your book. Did this perceived deficit weigh on you as you came up?
I certainly felt it as a handicap. I left school at 15 and two days, and had had a very basic education. In fact, the day of the exam for grammar school, I didn’t even sit for it. Instead, I went walking in the foothills of the Pennines near my house. I’ve never fully been able to grasp why I did that. I don’t think it was fear of the exam, but more that I didn’t want a grammar-school life; I wanted something more ordinary. I wanted to finish school and start earning a living. Years later, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I worked with actors far better educated than I was, many of them Oxbridge graduates, and I felt comfortable in that environment. If I didn’t always understand everything they were saying, I learned the language—the implications of language and the subtlety of language—and that was enormously beneficial, really, for everything that came after, right through Star Trek: The Next Generation to X-Men.
In X-Men, you battled your fellow Royal Shakespeare Company alum Ian McKellen. In your memoir, you describe a sort of Promethean moment in middle school, when a teacher hands out copies of The Merchant of Venice and tells you to read the part of Shylock, and that text unlocks something deep within you.
Yes, I had no idea what my character was saying. The first words were the beginning of a very long speech, in what’s known as the “trial scene,” and while I had no real understanding of what they meant, something got through to me, and I’ve never been able to quite determine what it was. Somehow, I picked up a sense of feeling and passion and the rhythm of the iambic pentameter; it touched me. Soon after, I was talking to the curate of my parish church, where I was a choir boy, and I told him about this experience. He said, “Well, that’s really very interesting—do you know a lot of Shakespeare?” And I said, “No, just this one scene I read from The Merchant of Venice.” A few days later, he showed up with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, an inexpensive volume, and that became my companion for years and years and years and years. It’s on my bookshelf in London.
One of your earliest tasks in training to be an actor was to lose your Yorkshire accent.
I didn’t just speak Yorkshire as an accent, but as a dialect. We’d use words that don’t really exist in the English most people speak. I give one of my favorite examples in my book: When I would knock on a friend’s door and he answered, I’d say, “Ata laykin aht?”
Huh?
“Ata” is descended from “art thou”— “are you.” “Laykin” is a very old word for “playing”; in fact, in Shakespeare’s time, actors were called laykers. And “aht” means “out.” So “Ata laykin aht” is “Are you coming out to play?” We said “thee” and “thou” to each other all the time, but you had to be careful. You couldn’t say it to my father, or he’d wallop you. If you said, “oh… thee” to him? Whap!
You worked in the theater for many years before your first screen role. What was the transition like?
I never confused the techniques for theater and for film. Acting for film is very, very technical, and the most important thing I ever learned, I heard on my first ever feature film, when I did half a day’s work on a film called Hennessy, which starred Rod Steiger. Steiger was one of my heroes, from seeing him in On the Waterfront when I was young. He’d heard that it was my first day on a film set, and he invited me out to lunch, where we talked and talked and talked about film acting. He said to me, “ Patrick, one thing you must never forget: The camera photographs thoughts.” I’d never heard a concept like that before, and I understood it at once. It became the condition of almost all the work I ever did on camera after that.
In Making It So, you state that you “have never quite gotten over” being turned down by the Dewsbury Drama Club. That reminded me of how Harrison Ford apparently still nurses a decades-old grudge for a film executive named Jerry Tokofsky who terminated his contract in the 1960s. “In the actor’s life,” you write, “you shuck off the triumphs but hang onto the rejections, especially the early ones.” Why is this?
I can’t explain it, but I am aware of it. [Harrison Ford] and I, by the way, have one thing in common: We have the same birthday.
Really?
Yeah. A few years ago, I learned that Harrison Ford and I were both born on the 13th of July. At the time, it made my chest puff out.
For someone so well-fixed in the Hollywood firmament, you drop very few names. When you do, though, you make it count. I’m thinking of a 1965 play you were in with a young actress named Jane Asher…
Oh, yes, we were all working in the same theater company, and we’d all sat around the pub one day, and somebody began a little game, saying, “Respond straight away: If I give you a million pounds in cash, what would you buy?” I said, “An Aston Martin DB4.” That very next weekend, after a performance, there was a knock on my dressing room door, and Jane’s boyfriend at the time, Paul McCartney, was standing there. He’d come to see Jane in the show, and he said, “Jane tells me you like Aston Martins—here, drive this,” and he tossed me the keys to his car, which I later drove with him and Jane in the back seat.
OK, 1965 is the year Rubber Soul came out, and Paul McCartney literally tells you, “Baby, you can drive my car.”
[Laughs.] I’ve never thought of that before.
During the darkest days of the pandemic, you started posting to Instagram recordings of yourself performing a different Shakespeare sonnet each day. Do you have a favorite sonnet?
I have several, actually. I think 116 is my favorite one. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments. Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” Oh, yes—it’s a beauty, that one. There are also many very difficult sonnets. Once I’d committed myself to a-sonnet-a-day-keeps-the-doctor-away, some of the days were quite challenging. Probably a third of the sonnets are like that: Shakespeare playing with vowel sounds and consonants, so that they have this kind of rat-a-tat-tat sound, almost like a conductor beating time.
I was going to play a little game and try to get you to name your favorite Hamlet, your favorite Lear. I assume your favorite Macbeth is your friend Ian McKellen’s?
Oh, yes, no question. He was the Macbeth of my generation. As was Judi Dench, who played Lady Macbeth. The plays that I love most would be the two parts of Henry IV, the play with Prince Hal and Falstaff. Henry IV is a role that I played, and I always hoped that one day I would play Falstaff, because it’s a great, great role, with so much richness and diversity, in that he’s funny and tragic and desperate and frightening. It’s a wonderfully complex piece of writing, so one day, who knows. But then again, a director told me a few weeks ago that I was too old to play King Lear.
What? You can’t be too old to play King Lear!
Well, younger and younger actors are playing him. It’s become, in a way, quite popular. We’ve had a couple of highly praised female King Lears as well. There’s so much of that nature happening in film, and especially theater, and I enjoy it immensely.
In your book, you describe a decades-long battle with anxiety and other foes of creative expression—and a ritual you came up with to help fight it. I was hoping you could share that here.
Well, to young actors—student actors or someone in the early years of their career—I will talk about courage and fearlessness, because I was fearful when I started acting. Partly because I thought I wasn’t qualified to be an actor. I wasn’t clever enough. I wasn’t well educated enough. I thought I didn’t have a natural skill. But yes, I still do say it: Before I set my foot on the stage for the first time each night, or when a camera is about to roll on an important scene, I will say to myself, out loud but very, very softly, “I don’t give a damn.” Of course I do give a damn; I give a desperate damn. But I don’t let that hinder me. If anything, I let it liberate me.
