“I wanted only to be as good an actor as I could be in my working life and I never set out to be a celebrity, but it came unexpectedly, relatively late after Star Trek: The Next Generation first aired, and I soon realised it brings with it certain responsibilities. I’ve talked to Ian McKellen and others about this, and, as pompous as this may sound, I think a lot of us in the entertainment business feel we should try to do what we can to make the world a better place.
“Ian is a serious activist on gay rights and so many issues and I would never compare myself to him, but I do what I can. It startles me the influence that people like me can have on social media and so on. Of course, you can communicate, too, through the work you do and I have always been rather proud of the underlying social messaging going on with, say, Star Trek.
“My character Jean-Luc Picard always stood for equality, democracy, fairness, and he had no interest in materialism and he hated prejudice. After the show’s creator Gene Roddenberry died – a man I loved dearly, but he was very much a Republican was Gene – we got even more of an opportunity when Rick Berman took over to discuss, in our own way, contemporary society in a the context of a show set in the future.”
Sir Patrick says he was struck by how many people said to him, after the surprise announcement this month that he would be reprising the role in a new CBS All Access series, how much Jean-Luc was “needed now more than ever”. He is inevitably no great fan of Donald Trump and what worries him about the phenomenon he represents in politics is that people will simply become accustomed to his offensiveness.
“Repulsion and shock can only be sustained for a certain period of time and there is a real danger people will soon start to just shrug their shoulders when Trump starts to tell his lies or attack decent, innocent people, and say ‘oh well, that’s just him’, and he will get a second term.
“We are getting used to this technique now in politics where a politician without any scruples says the great big lie or outrageous thing and it gets all the headlines, and then, if someone manages to prove it’s made up, there is maybe a retraction of some kind that goes in small type on an inside page and no one notices.
“We are seeing this here, too. People said after Boris Johnson talked the other day about Muslim women ‘going around looking like letterboxes or bank robbers’. that he was just joking and it was only ‘Boris being Boris’, but no, actually, it was not alright. It was insulting and discriminating and anyone who knows anything about history knows where this can lead.”
