A singular role like Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard or X-Men’s Charles Xavier would be enough to make any actor a permanent fixture in the halls of TV and film history (not to mention beloved by nerds everywhere). But for Sir Patrick Stewart, those roles were just a pair of notable highlights in a career that spanned over sixty years and every possible medium. From stage plays and voice work to parts on screens large and small, Stewart did everything, and did it with effortless talent and flair. Choosing one signature performance is a nigh-impossible task, but The A.V. Club staff is going to try to at least narrow it down. Here are some of our favorite Patrick Stewart performances.
Charles Xavier, X-Men movies
Oh, it’s hard to hear Sir Patrick Stewart say, in this X-Men clip, “I will always be there, old friend.” It’s a snapshot of the gravitas he brought to everything, including this big-budget superhero film. I remember being moved by how Stewart turned the deceptively simple role of Charles Xavier into the emotional crux of the movie and its sequels. Thank goodness Stewart jumped into another franchise after Star Trek, starting with the 2000 movie X-Men. It also was and will remain a pleasure to watch Stewart interact with longtime pal Ian McKellen, who plays Magneto. While his work in Logan as the aging, deeply vulnerable Charles would’ve been a great end to this legacy character, I find myself suddenly grateful that we’ll see Stewart—however briefly—reprise this character in Avengers: Doomsday. [Saloni Gajjar]
Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek franchise
I don’t see this as the obvious choice but an undeniable one—as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart embodied the best of Star Trek, which, at its best, represents the best of humanity. Stewart played Picard with the right mix of poise, intelligence, empathy, and, I’ll say it, sexiness. Picard was an assured leader, one who inspired bravery among his crew, and I’m not sure any character’s given more rousing speeches on the bridge of any ship. But his signature traits were really curiosity and understanding; “engage” wasn’t just a command to make the Enterprise go, it was his directive when seeking out new life and new civilizations. Stewart never stopped trying to engage and understand in the nearly 30 years he played Picard; whatever you want to say about the rest of the show that bore the character’s name, Stewart’s portrayal of him was ever-evolving. It’s a rare gift to be able to follow a performer and their character for three decades, but it’s just one of many Stewart imparted to the culture.
Darcy, Green Room
There’s nothing better than someone extraordinarily likable on screen—and by all accounts, lovely when off-screen—going against type in the most heinous fashion. When Patrick Stewart curdled his warm paternal gravitas and devoted his classically trained pathos to heading up a skinhead bar, it gave Green Room the kind of imposing menace that its brutal thrills deserved. His turn as Darcy, the neo-Nazi villain trying to eradicate a recklessly anti-Nazi punk band, is perfectly calm, completely in control, and covering up all threats of violence with eloquence and etiquette. It’s scary as all get-out, thoroughly indicative of how this kind of hateful rhetoric so easily masks itself in American culture, and sold subtly by an actor who always took the work seriously. [Jacob Oller]
Avery Bullock, American Dad!
Patrick Stewart’s surprisingly long association with Seth MacFarlane grew, one presumes, out of the Family Guy creator’s deeply held and abiding love of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it continued, in large part, because it allowed Stewart to indulge one of his great acting loves: Being a magnificent, unrestrained, over-the-top ham. As resident boss/deputy CIA director Avery Bullock on the MacFarlane-starring American Dad!, Stewart got to say some of the most gleefully batshit lines of his whole legendary career, pitting his endless reserves of dignity against the most vile madness the show’s writers could concoct. “I sometimes feel,” Stewart said of the role—in a speech delivered at what was, somehow, less than halfway through his 125-episode run on the series—”That I was the subject of some kind of private joke when they cast me.” Nevertheless: “It has given me as much pleasure as anything else in my career.” [William Hughes]
Macbeth, Great Performances: Macbeth
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that as good Stewart was onscreen, the man was truly great on stage. I was lucky enough to see him perform several times—as Claudius in Hamlet, as Prospero in The Tempest, alongside his best friend Sir Ian McKellen in both No Man’s Land and Waiting For Godot—and it’s hard to overstate how commanding his stage presence was, or how easily he made the most dense dialogue feel natural and accessible. (The man was born to recite iambic pentameter.)
But one of his best stage roles was as the titular lead in Rupert Goold’s 2007 production of Macbeth, which was later restaged as a film and aired in America on PBS’s Great Performances. It reimagined the Scottish play as a Soviet-tinged Cold War nightmare with heavy gothic vibes and a prodigious amount of blood. Here, Stewart’s king is not just a paranoid military dictator, but a man who undergoes the kind of brutal psychological collapse that recalls the worst of Hamlet’s self-destructive introspection, and it’s an interpretation that sticks with you long after King Malcom’s final lines.
Patrick Stewart always brought a certain eloquent panache and gravitas to any role he took, be it the Adventure book with a pirate accent in The Pagemaster, a fearsome Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, or as Paul Atreides’ stern teacher, Gurney Halleck in David Lynch’s maligned adaptation of Dune. With the same sort of solemnity as he brought to Shakespeare, he brought to Halleck, trying to toughen up his young charge for the unknown dangers that lie ahead. But just as tough as Stewart was as a fighting instructor, he could easily dip into Halleck’s vulnerable side, like when teacher and student reunite on the battlefields of Arrakis, they embrace in the din of war. When a Harkonnen challenger rises against Paul, a look of worry flashes across Stewart’s face and his character offers himself as a sacrifice to save his pupil. His performance as Halleck was the blueprint for the kind of mentor roles we’d see Stewart in the X-Men franchise and, in just a few years after Dune, Star Trek, paving the way for how many of his fans remember him best. [Monica Castillo]
Keep scrolling for more great stories.