I have my moments when I wish he had listened to Sir Ian... And I do wonder if there's a parallel universe where he refused the role/wasn't given the part after all.
If Patrick Stewart was never Picard, would he have been Xavier? He had roles in Excalibur and Dune before TNG (and maybe a few other mainstream movies), but where would he be without Picard? Where would we be without PS as Picard? It's too horrible to think about.
No, he would probably never have been chosen to play Xavier. He would only have been known to a handful of nerds (Dune was a failure commercially, after all), and I doubt they'd have given the part of Xavier to a relatively unknown British stage actor (he'd have concentrated on his stage career, he never planned to make it big in movies or television). They would never have known that he can perfectly play "the bald guy in charge of the good guys". I'd say that the Trek fandom would be fine tho - someone else would have played Jean-Luc, and if they had chosen a powerful enough actor he'd have carried TNG just like Sir Patrick did and it would have been just as - or maybe even more? - successful. I myelf would probably not be a fan of Sir Patrick now because TNG served as my introduction to him as an actor, without it this would not have happened. Hmm. Yes, I know, this is all complete blasphemy.
That goes back to the "Mulgrew was a better Janeway than Bujold would have been" discussion and that's probably right-on if only based on a few minutes of Bujold as Janeway. But if it had been Bujold the whole time, would we be saying "Bujold>Mulgrew would have been"? Would they have gotten sick of Bujold after a couple years and killed Janeway off? Patrick Stewart brought a lot of gravitas to the role that I don't think anyone else could have, so in that way he's better than anyone else could have been as Picard. So we got a great Xavier, plus some awesome Pontiac commercials, and who could forget American Dad and Family Guy?
Oh yes, the gravitas is his unique trademark. No one does it quite like he does. We also don't know if another actor would have become as invested in Jean-Luc as Sir Patrick became - I mean he'd call Rick Berman all the time whenever he felt something in a script wasn't in-character and all. But hey, I'd still like to know how his career would have unfolded without all the Hollywood glamor. Who knows, maybe he'd be just as happy as a relatively unknown stage actor as he is now? And we wouldn't have sonnets every day during a pandemic now either because I very much doubt he'd ever have bothered with Twitter in the first place, it took his team QUITE a bit of time to convince him to give social media a chance, and as an unknown actor he'd just have said "I don't need it, no one outside British theater knows who I am anyway".
In the very beginning, did you think Jacmman was way too tall for Wolverine? But in the end, I can't imagine anyone better.
A new article/interview with Sir Patrick on the future of theater in the UK: Sir Patrick Stewart: 'Even if I do a one man show, I shall perform it at the Royal Shakespeare theatre'
CBS has the Champions League (soccer, y'all) and they picked the best narrator for the trailer: Click Me
A great new little interview with Sir Patrick on the subject of music/arts: https://www.wwfm.org/post/tempo-pat...ower-art-and-music-through-sonnets-movie-coda
Watched that as part of my Star Trek Day entertainment. It was a very good interview--nice to see them "together," so to speak.
Yeah, it was a nice little interview. It’s always wonderful to experience the sense of family the TNG cast members have with each other. I do have a feeling they cut out a lot of off topic bantering tho!
A great new interview with Sir Patrick and Mark Hamill: Sir Patrick Stewart and Mark Hamill On ‘Star Wars’, ‘Star Trek’, and Finally Working Together Also comes with this great pic: