A light has gone out of the universe, as Sir Patrick Stewart died on Wednesday, October 28. The legendary actor’s final film role will be “Avengers: Doomsday,” scheduled for release on December 18, 2026, where he will again play Professor Charles Xavier. It’s a fitting denouement; Stewart played Professor X across many films for 26 years, and he remains the greatest casting for a comic book superhero in history.
Stewart’s penultimate role was a voiceover part in the whimsical murder mystery “The Sheep Detectives” (now available to watch at home), where he indeed played one of the sheep as part of an all-star voice cast including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, and Regina Hall. His “X-Men” co-star, Hugh Jackman, plays the flock’s shepherd and the murder victim at the center of the film’s mystery. Stewart’s character, Sir Ritchfield, is one of the oldest and most conservative sheep in the flock. If these last two roles don’t sum up how eclectic Patrick Stewart’s acting career was, nothing does.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, Stewart was one of the finest players in the Royal Shakespeare Company. On the screen, he made an impression in several BBC miniseries during that same period. To name only a couple, he played Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevik revolutionary and future founder of the Soviet Union, in 1974’s “Fall of Eagles” and then Roman soldier Sejanus in the 1976 BBC adaptation of “I, Claudius.”
Then, of course, it was also television that made him a legend when, in 1987, he took on the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” which he returned to for the last time in 2023 for the third season of “Star Trek: Picard.”
Patrick Stewart was no stranger to playing against type
Sir Patrick Stewart’s roles as Picard and Professor X, figures of gravitas and authority, made that his dominant onscreen persona; his deep, British-accented voice and ability to say anything with conviction helped there. But Stewart often used that voice to play his screen persona for comedy.
“Family Guy” and “American Dad” creator Seth MacFarlane is a huge Trekkie — hence him making his own “Star Trek”-inspired show, “The Orville.” Stewart had a recurring role on “American Dad” as CIA Deputy Director Avery Bullock (who is also drawn to physically resemble Stewart). That sounds like a typical Stewart role in the vein of Picard, right? Wrong. Bullock is an obscene and often deranged character, not to mention one of the funniest on the show.
It’s not a new observation that Bullock’s dialogue often feels written to be as deliberately ridiculous as possible, just for the comic dissonance of hearing those words in Patrick Stewart’s dignified baritone. Take the “American Dad” Season 5 episode “G-String Circus,” where Bullock blows the CIA’s leftover budget on taking the agency staff to a strip club. As he hands them money to burn, he delivers a euphemism-filled monologue in the cadence of Dr. Seuss:
“Oh, the things you can buy with a handful of bills. It makes me excited. It gives me the chills. There’ll be filch-arounds, breeders, hambones and tweeners. Zobows and debows and blobs that go “eener.” For a one-dollar bill, you can pull down their zippers. I am the Snorax. I speak for the strippers!”
Some actors are great at comedy, while some are great at drama. Patrick Stewart was a generational talent at both, and his comedy was only funnier because of how much audiences respected his dramatic gravitas. May he rest in peace knowing that.
Leave a Reply