Ian McKellen urged Patrick Stewart not to do ‘Star Trek’ for this crazy reason
Star Trek years in his new memoir, Make It So.Stewart, 83, is best known for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 to 1994.
He reprised the role in movies and more recently in Star Trek: Picard.Before this, Stewart had a successful career in the theatre.
So much so that his pal, McKellen, 84, cautioned him from moving across to a major TV franchise such as Star Trek.“When I told him I was going to sign the contract, he almost bodily prevented me from doing so,” writes Stewart.“‘No!’ he said. ‘No, you must not do that.
You must not. You have too much important theater work to do. You can’t throw that away to do TV. You can’t. No!’”Fortunately, Stewart ignored McKellen’s advice.“There are few people, particularly with regard to acting, whose counsel I trust more than Ian’s,” he says. “But this time I had to tell him that I felt theater would return to my life whenever I was ready for it, whereas an offer of the lead role in an American TV series might never come again.”Who knows?
