Patrick Stewart’s final film is a fitting end to a career that defied snobbery

‘No, you must not do that. You must not. You have too much important theatre work to do TV. No, you can’t.’

This is what Sir Ian McKellen told his friend, Sir Patrick Stewart, when the latter announced he planned on signing up for a new sci-fi show called Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

Thank god, Sir Patrick ignored his colleague’s warning because it was the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard that catapulted the Yorkshire-born actor to worldwide fame. 

More than that, for self-confessed nerds with the athletic ability of an asthmatic daddy longlegs (it couldn’t possibly be me), Captain Picard served as a role model – proof that you didn’t need to be the strongest or toughest to lead. 

You could be clever, compassionate and diplomatic (you could even play the flute), and still inspire those around you to greatness. 

That’s not something you see a lot on television. 

And last night, as the devastating news that Sir Patrick had died travelled the world at the speed of social media, I found myself thinking about Sir Ian’s initial horrified reaction. 

He no doubt thought his friend was slumming it in the silly world of science fiction. That pretending to be a man on a spaceship was somehow lesser than pretending to be a king on a stage.

I still find it weird that people seek to impose a hierarchy on something as subjective as art.

Anyway, as the tributes poured out last night, the ghost of Sir Ian’s opinion began to haunt the gloomy halls of social media. 

On X, a minority of users began to decry that Sir Patrick’s final performance will be in the Marvel movie, Avengers: Doomsday, where he’ll reprise the role of Charles Xavier. 

‘He deserved better,’ wrote one user, while another claimed it ‘felt wrong’ that a superhero film would be his last acting job. 

It speaks volumes about Sir Patrick’s legacy as a performer that those who never met the man would feel the need to defend him from a perceived injustice. 

Yes, Sir Patrick was an incredible Shakespearean actor who cut his teeth treading the boards as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company; he was not just that.

He was Professor Charles Xavier; he was Captain Jean-Luc Picard; he was Avery Bullock. The man contained multitudes. 

It is ghoulish to impose your views on respectability and worthiness on a dead man’s career while ignoring the work he chose to do. 

And this is what irritates me the most about this view because it runs contrary to Sir Patrick’s views on Picard and Professor X. 

In his book ‘Making It So,’ Sir Patrick makes it clear he never saw playing these larger-than-life characters as easier work than working on a Shakespeare or Samuel Beckett play; he took every role seriously, even those that involved mutants and laser beams. 

Sir Patrick loved playing Picard and Professor X. In his book, he writes about how much he learned from his Star Trek cast, about how they taught him to take himself less seriously, and how honoured he was to be a ‘custodian’ of a franchise that meant so much to so many people. 

As for playing the telepathic teacher Charles Xavier, Sir Patrick says that role afforded him opportunities he never would have had without it, allowing him the financial freedom to work on stage. 

But more importantly, it was during filming on the X-Men that he formed one of the most important relationships: his friendship with Sir Ian. 

Before those films, the pair had been friends, but they’d never really had the opportunity to work together. It was during their downtime on Marvel sets that they forged their unbreakable bond. 

It’s infantilising to presume that playing Professor X again, alongside his best friend Sir Ian in what turned out to be the last few years of his life, was somehow beneath him. Especially when Sir Patrick is no longer here to talk about this perceived wrong.

I’m not here to defend the capesludge that Marvel has cranked out in the last few years; I haven’t seen Doomsday, so I can’t speak to its quality, but I am not going to assume for a second that it didn’t matter to Sir Patrick. 

This was a man possessed of such talent that he could make you believe a cardboard set on an LA backlot was the most advanced starship in history, that a teacher in a tinfoil hat was the comic book equivalent of Martin Luther King. 

He took this stuff seriously, and I think you should too. 

More than that, I believe it’s clear based on his book that Sir Patrick did not see a hierarchy of artistic worth. I think he believed in the quality of the performance, not the prestige of the production. 

And I’m not the only one who thinks that, it turns out. 

Sir Ian himself has admitted that the advice he gave his colleague when they were ambitious young actors was wrong. 

‘He took the risk and thank goodness for all of us that he did,’ wrote Sir Ian in his moving tribute to his best friend.

‘Not just [for] his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes (‘X-Men’ of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.’

I’ll finish then with the final words from Making It So where Sir Patrick discusses the future and possible retirement. 

‘I have so much more work to do. I am not done with the stage. I still want to try another TV comedy. I have so many characters inside me that I need to let out. And thank heavens the door is still open. So why would I ever stop?’