Patrick Stewart: The Next Generation

"Hello," I say, calling him out of his reverie. "Captain Kirk was quite a womanizer, right?"

"That's right, yes, romance was high in his life."

"So what about Captain Picard? He never seemed to be with a woman."

"Well, there have been episodes of romance. For the first couple of years, there were several. Most of the romancing in the series was based upon the sudden appearance in Picard's life of someone from his past, with a pastel-colored, wistful sense of what might have been if things had been different. It's boring, very boring."

"I know he was a good leader, but I wanted him to get laid," I say.

"He got laid. He got laid at least twice," Stewart says, looking pleased.

"Twice in seven years?"

"There are those who would say that it probably should have happened more often, but it was never quite that explicit. But yes, indeed, he did get laid, and you know what? It was good for him. It generally is."

"How come Paramount canceled 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' when it was still one of the most popular shows on television? There are people who say they did it because you refused to go on any longer with the show..."

"I don't believe that my situation had anything to do with the studio pulling the show. [If I'd left] I think they would have replaced me without a backward glance."

"That's true," I agree.

Stewart raises that eyebrow, as if he wished I'd told him how indispensable he was.

"You're right ... none of us are that exceptional that we can't be replaced, even though we'd like to think we are. The studio said that they were very anxious to begin to develop feature films with our cast, that they felt that it wasn't realistic to go on making movies with the original cast, and they didn't want their movie actors to be available every week during a TV series. In a sense, we were kicked upstairs."

"Do you realize that you may never be as famous as you are right now?" I say.

"I don't think that's necessarily true," he says, cringing.

"What were the numbers on the last segment of 'Next Generation'? Thirty million people watched it? Maybe 35 million? You'd have to sell a hell of a lot of movie tickets to draw that same audience ..."

He doesn't miss a beat. "That's what we're hoping this Star Trek movie is. It's called Star Trek Generations, and quite frankly, I'm a little disappointed, because I had come up with a good name, Star Trek: Rites of Passage, and for a while it looked like they were going to use it. But then they went back to Generations. Bill Shatner, Captain Kirk, is also in this film. I've read reports that said we didn't get along, and I'd like to go on record as saying that that's a lie, we got along fine. I liked working with him very much. One of the best parts of the film is that the director, David Carson, that's C-A-R-S-O-N ..."

I'm laughing.

"Well," says Stewart, "I was a journalist for a short time before I became an actor, so I always spell things out. Anyway, Carson is an Englishman, and given the fact that the guest star in the movie is Malcolm McDowell, well, the place was crawling with Brits. It was a remarkable shoot. The last three weeks we were on location with some of the most dramatic scenery that I've ever witnessed, and the climax of the movie happens on the top of a 500-foot pinnacle rock in the northeastern Nevada desert."

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