Sir Patrick Stewart has confessed he never really considered himself a funny guy when it came to acting roles.
After commanding a starship and a team of mutants in sci-fi and superhero franchises, Patrick’s newest mission is starring in his first-ever TV comedy. With his role in Blunt Talk as naughty newsman Walter Blunt, the classically trained theatre actor is discovering at the age of 75 that he can make people laugh.
“It’s a fairly recent development,” Patrick said. “When I first worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, I started in what’s called ‘low comedy’ roles, like Touchstone, Grumio and Lancelot. Then, something happened, and I was only playing deeply disturbed kings and neurotics. I never really went back.”
Sir Patrick and the Blunt Talk team (Matt Sayles/AP)
While he’s best known as Professor Charles Xavier in X-Men and Captain Jean-Luc Picard from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series, Patrick has spent more of his career on stage than in the X-Mansion or on the USS Enterprise.
Besides playing everyone from Claudius to Macbeth, he’s performed a one-man rendition of A Christmas Carol and finished a West End and Broadway run last year of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot with friend Sir Ian McKellen.
“It’s no different,” said Patrick. “It’s just a lot more fun. The fundamentals don’t change because going for truth, realism and spontaneity is all still the objective, but now it’s also about going for humour. I’ve found the more serious you play the words from the script, the funnier they can become, so to my relief, it works.”
In Blunt Talk, Patrick plays a cheeky Falklands War veteran and host of a cable news show. In the first episode, the booze-and-cocaine-loving anchorman is caught in a car with a prostitute and attempts to rehabilitate his image by interviewing himself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLBPSSVVOe4&feature=oembed
“Walter wants to change the world, but his private life is a complete disaster,” says Patrick. “That’s where a lot of the humour comes from in the show. How can he possibly balance his journalistic passions and keep his life in somewhat reasonable order?”
The series is executive produced by Seth MacFarlane, who worked with Patrick on Family Guy and American Dad!, and created by Jonathan Ames, who collaboratively fashioned the role of Blunt with Patrick.
“I wrote this show for Patrick Stewart and created the character for him. It was the actor first, then the character. It began with how he looked. Patrick Stewart has always played leaders and heroes. I wanted to make Walter Bunt a hero but a confused hero, a Don Quixote,” he said.
Patrick said he didn’t think he’d ever be back as a regular on a TV series after Star Trek: The Next Generation ended.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgbOa0Tr2AI&feature=oembed
“It feels so good and so different,” he says. “I truly felt when Next Generation ended in ’94, I could not face that pressure and those hours any more. The idea of a half-hour comedy show had never been part of my game plan until Seth called me, and here I am. There’s no going back now.”
