Sir Patrick Stewart Tells on Himself in an Excerpt from His Memoir
Book cover and Mirfield, West Yorkshire. Photos: Mark Seliger and Humphrey Bolton.
OCTOBER 4, 2023 – Sir Patrick Stewart, as he has been known since being knighted in 2010, came to the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation by way of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its attendant gravitas. But as he describes in his new autobiography, Making It So, that gravitas did not always serve him well.
The Hollywood Reporter is sharing an exclusive excerpt from Making It So in which Stewart describes why he stormed off the first-season set after his castmates were taking the proceedings with less than the seriousness that Stewart was used to.
Stewart was nervous about his first regular television series and wanted to prove its naysayers wrong. Following instances of being teased by his fellow actors and their laughing at flubbed lines or ad-libbing jokes, he finally left the set and holed up in his trailer.
“I could be a severe bastard,” he writes. “My experiences at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre had been intense and serious … On the TNG set, I grew angry with the conduct of my peers, and that’s when I called that meeting in which I lectured the cast for goofing off and responded to Denise Crosby’s, ‘We’ve got to have some fun sometimes, Patrick’ comment by saying, ‘We are not here, Denise, to have fun.'”
“In retrospect,” Stewart continues, “everyone, me included, finds this story hilarious. But in the moment, when the cast erupted in hysterics at my pompous declaration, I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t enjoy being laughed at."
After a while, Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner went to Stewart’s trailer and discussed the situation and helped him to realize, “I had failed to read the room, imposing RSC behavior on people accustomed to the ways of episodic television — which was, after all, what we were shooting.”
For more on Sir Patrick Stewart’s memoir, from further reflection on TNG to his Los Angeles house which he believes is haunted, head over to The Hollywood Reporter.
Making It So is out now from Gallery Books. You can get a sneak preview of the audio version, read by Stewart himself, below:
David is a contributing writer for Daily Star Trek News on the Roddenberry Podcast Network. He is a librarian, baseball fan, and book and movie buff. He has also written for American Libraries and Skeptical Inquirer. David also enjoys diverse music, but leans toward classical and jazz. He plays a mean radio.
