Patrick Stewart: I would like to see us get this place right first bef...

As the captain, I was going to be having the dominant role in most of the episodes, and that was appealing. I wasn't interested in coming to Hollywood to sit around.

Patrick Stewart

captains hollywood roles

Tom Hanks knows the name of all the episodes.

Patrick Stewart

episodes names knows

Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment.

Patrick Stewart

tanks captains lions

I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.

Patrick Stewart

hair may men

Having played many roles of scientific intellect I do have an empathy for that world. It's been hard on me because flying the Enterprise for seven years in Star Trek and sitting in Cerebro in X-men has led people to believe that I know what I'm talking about. But I'm still trying to work out how to operate the air conditioning unit on my car.

Patrick Stewart

stars men believe

I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.

Patrick Stewart

sentimental canvas absurd

I've met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it's just not worth working with them.

Patrick Stewart

theatre people thinking

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.

Patrick Stewart

creating important world

We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!

Patrick Stewart

space done fall

I do what I do in my mother's name because I couldn't help her then. Now I can.

Patrick Stewart

mother names helping

There's no such thing as "just a domestic".

Patrick Stewart

domestic-violence violence

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

Patrick Stewart

irritation kings years

An obsession might be a little strong a term, but it has now become one of the most significant aspects of my life, but most importantly of my career, because it has changed the public's perception of who Patrick Stewart is.

Patrick Stewart

careers perception strong

For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.

Patrick Stewart

theatre littles years

Encouraging people to believe in it was the most important thing of all. It's one of the reasons I was always uncomfortable whenever film crews came on the set to shoot things. I didn't want our make-believe to be exposed.

Patrick Stewart

important believe people

During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that's all. It was part of our job.

Patrick Stewart

oil jobs years

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

Patrick Stewart

falling-in-love hero children

I've been a witness to unfairness in society all my life. To the conditions under which my mother worked all her life, working in an industrial weaving shed in the north of England. And it has been this feature of unfairness that has motivated me in all of my political thinking.

Patrick Stewart

political mother thinking

I've been in politics all my life. In 1945, I committed my first act of civil disobedience during the election campaign for the first post-World War II general election, when the Labour Party, to everyone's amazement, ousted the Conservatives. I refused to obey the instructions of a policeman, and as a result, almost got a belt around the ear, because those were the days when policemen could hit children and nobody cared, they thought it was probably good for them.

Patrick Stewart

party war children

Where can I go that would give me the same level of satisfaction as an actor?

Patrick Stewart

levels actors giving

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.