Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart returns to X-Men franchise

At 76, Patrick Stewart has learned to ensure his appetite for diverse roles is always sated.

Patrick Stewart: ‘I was very uncomfortable about getting trapped.’ Picture: AP

Patrick Stewart originally said no to X-Men. He’d been there, done that, he thought. He’d spent seven years in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he wasn’t keen on being defined by another character, even for the rewards of a blockbuster movie franchise.

He was worried he would be locked into a set of expectations. “Diversity of work and material and characters has always been absolutely central to me.” Yet he said yes to a Marvel superhero role and found a way to reconcile blockbusters and Broadway, Shakespeare and sitcoms.

Last year, he says, was the perfect example of what he craves. “It was a thrilling way to spend a year, but it was most exhausting.” For the first four months he worked on a half-hour comedy series for US television. Then he went to Louisiana to film Logan, his sixth X-Men movie. Through the second half of the year he was on the London stage, appearing in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land.

Logan, which opens in Australia next week, has the feeling of both an end and a beginning. It is the last of three stand-alone movies to feature the character of Logan aka Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman, the mutant with anger management issues who brings a considerable emotional weight to the franchise.

Patrick Stewart as the frail Charles with Hugh Jackman in Logan.

Logan, co-written and directed by James Mangold (I Walk the Line, 3.10 to Yuma), is set in a different place from much of the X-Men universe. It is a bruising, often violent film, a contemporary western that plunges us into a broken world a dozen years hence, from which mutants, or X-Men, have almost entirely disappeared. The scenes shift between El Paso and Mexico. Logan — a battered, battle-weary figure whose famous powers of recovery seem diminished — is making a living driving a limousine while taking care of Stewart’s character, Charles Xavier. Charles or Professor X, is in his 90s, fierce and frail and fading fast.

When Stewart made the first X-Men film, Charles was a character brimming with authority, beneficence and extraordinary gifts, a teacher and a father figure. In Logan his capacities are diminishing, his telepathic abilities are waning, and he is suffering from seizures that have an unsettling impact on the immediate vicinity. But he is still a benevolent force who takes a paternal interest in Logan. And, despite his fragility, he’s aware there’s someone nearby who needs their help — someone who can, in a way, help Logan. A young girl called Laura (Dafne Keen) comes into their lives. She has a confronting stare and a mysterious past, and she brings danger and hope with her.

We talk about the elements of Lear and Prospero in Charles Xavier, and the role of family in the latest film. There was always a particularly strong connection between the characters of Charles and Logan, Stewart says. “Charles saw the vulnerability in Logan when others saw only the violent, angry man. Charles cared for him because he understood better than anyone else that along with his extraordinary powers there was fear and weakness and apprehension, and Charles could relate to that. And in the — what is it? — six movies that I’ve been in, more than any other character, Logan has been the mutant that Charles is always most anxious about. Logan had always been a significant danger to himself, and Charles has always tried to steer him away from his self-destructive impulses.” He’s still doing that in Logan, to the very last.

When he agreed to take the role of Commander Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, Stewart had spent much of his acting life on stage — he was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1966 to 1982. When he wondered about the wisdom of moving to Los Angeles, he was told he need not worry about signing on for an extended period of time — his agent predicted the show would not last. Seven seasons and four movies later, his time at the helm of the starship USS Enterprise was over, but his life had been transformed.

With X-Men, Stewart says, he had an inkling of what he would be getting into. “From the first script, it was clear that it had franchise written all over it — I was very uncomfortable about getting trapped.

“I had already become aware that there was a certain downside to having played a very successful and popular character in a series. Although the exposure was wonderful, there was a strong sense that one became as an actor entirely identified with one character, which is never how I have worked.”

A young girl, Laura (Dafne Keen), comes into the life of Wolverine (Jackman) in Logan.

Yet director Bryan Singer “was very insistent and persuasive, saying that this would be totally different from Star Trek. And on the basis of that, and my great fondness for his other work that I had seen, I made the I now think quite sensible decision that I would play Charles Xavier.” Once he had said yes, he says, the rest was easy. “It wasn’t hard to love the world that Bryan had introduced me to, and my character in X-Men, and I saw nothing but a benefit in continuing to be part of it.

“From the very beginning, one of the things I believe that had made the X-Men franchise attractive was that it’s always been about something. Not just sticking a subject on to the movie — it’s been central to the movie,” Stewart says. “The films were always about the danger of exclusivity, of prejudice, of people having to live undercover lives because of what they were. And with what is happening now in the United States, and in England with Brexit, the themes of films like Logan are very pertinent.”

Whatever happens, he will always return to the theatre, he says. “Oh lord, yes, the only reason I became an actor was to work on stage. But I’m now 76, and doing eight performances a week of big and challenging plays is a little more demanding than it used to be. So I have to plan quite carefully what I can do in terms of live performance and where I can do it.”

Stewart began last year by making the second season of TV comedy Blunt Talk, produced by Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) with writer and showrunner Jonathan Ames (Bored to Death). He played a British Army veteran turned cable journalist who moved to New York to do a nightly TV show. Jacki Weaver played his friend and producer-manager. Brent Spiner from Star Trek: The Next Generation appeared as a pianist at his local bar. The series has now been cancelled.

Then came Logan, before he was off to spend six months on stage in London, appearing in No Man’s Land opposite his good friend Ian McKellen (as young men they had been members of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the same time, but did not really get to know each other until years later, in X-Men, in which McKellen played Charles’s friend-turned-foe Magneto).

He and McKellen were both “full hands-on producers” of the London season of No Man’s Land, Stewart says, and he also took a producer’s role in Blunt Talk.

It’s a creative role he has explored, he says, with mixed success. In the 1990s, he and his then wife, producer Wendy Neuss, set up a production company. “We produced a handful of television films I’m very proud of. Unfortunately we never got any of our film projects off the ground, and I became very disillusioned about movie development.”

He thought of this again not long ago, he says, going through some old possessions. “My life has always been filled with unopened cardboard boxes because I move around so much. I opened one recently to find a file with all the film projects of my production company inside.”

He was pleasantly surprised by what he saw, he says. “I looked through them, and every single one of them I would back — even 15, 20 years later. But am I going to do any of them? It’s unlikely. It’s an exhausting and at times dispiriting business, although the projects we got made were very satisfying.”

One of the great benefits of Star Trek and X-Men is that they have given him the resources to explore something that has fascinated him since childhood when, as a working-class boy from Yorkshire, his life was transformed by an English teacher putting a copy of The Merchant of Venice in his hands. There were reproductions of great paintings hanging on the walls at school, he says. “And at a very early age I quite precociously loved looking at art books. I fantasised about the artists I would have hanging on my wall, never imagining that one day it would be possible. It’s been a source of profound pleasure in my life, and continues to be.”

He prefers not to name names for the most part, but says his collection spans the past 140 years, “from very, very early impressionists through post-impressionists to the work of German artists in particular, and English painting and drawing from the 20s, 30s and 40s”.

There are some he is happy to name, however, particularly when it comes to living artists whose work he collects. One, a Scottish artist called Frank To, is both a friend and a teacher. “I spotted him early on when I was chancellor of the University of Huddersfield and saw this young man’s work in his final degree show. His career is really beginning to take off; his work is very bold, adventurous, unusual and distinctive.

“I’m now actually taking painting lessons from him myself, and enjoying myself immensely.”

And he does have, he adds, some Australian works that mean much to him. “I have three Arthur Boyds that I love so much. And three works by his brother David, because I knew David very well; I got to know him when I was working in Australia in 1961. And I have two Sidney Nolans that I’m so proud of.”

One of the Nolans, he says, is a particular ­delight. “It is a small painting done on the back of a postcard — and I actually mean a postcard — from his great Ned Kelly series. When I saw it in Melbourne, the owner of the gallery said to me, ‘This might interest you. Turn it over and look on the other side.’ And on the other side it says, ‘To Orson Welles, with greatest admiration, Sidney Nolan’.”

Logan opens in cinemas on Thursday.