At the time, Patrick Stewart was by no means sure of his iconic role as Jean-Luc Picard. To impress the creator of Star Trek, the actor even had a wig flown in from London.
From today’s perspective, it is difficult to imagine that anyone other than the great Sir Patrick Stewart could ever portray the commander of the USS Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard. But that was by no means a given.
Because Stewart, who was already in his mid-40s at this point and had thinning hair, did not at all correspond to the image that Eugene “Gene” Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, had of his new protagonist.
Roddenberry probably wanted a kind of young William Shatner, a daring adventurer à la Indiana Jones and not a “bald-headed Englishman,” as producer Rick Berman revealed in a 2006 interview (via Television Academy Foundation).
Ultimately, Patrick Stewart had to audition four times to get the role – although he actually didn’t want to do long filming in the USA. The Englishman ultimately got the role because Berman advocated for him. But the whole story is a little stranger than that.
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“Take the Englishman, but take away the wig!”
How did Patrick Stewart get the role? As Patrick Stewart reported on The Graham Norton Show, he received a call from his agent before his fourth and final audition. He asked whether Stewart had a wig or a hairpiece.
Apparently the idea was that Gene Roddenberry would be more likely to warm to him than Picard if he had hair. As an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stewart actually had a very high-quality hairpiece. But that was in London.
The hairpiece was flown in from England especially for the audition, as Stewart remembers with a laugh: “Those were the days.” You can watch Stewart’s version of the story in this clip – it even includes a picture of the actor with the hairpiece:
How did the audition go? Patrick Stewart reports that he actually wore the hairpiece for the audition. He even had a make-up artist on site who neatly styled the fake hair. Back in his dressing room, she took the hairpiece from him when she suddenly heard a knock.
According to Patrick Stewart, executives at Paramount Pictures, where the filming was to take place, came in to thank him for his time “and all that crap,” the actor said.
The case was clear to his make-up artist: She said that the producers had definitely come in because he had the role and they wanted to see him without a wig.
In fact, Berman reports that Patrick Stewart and another actor auditioned for John Pike, then head of Paramount. He then said the redeeming words: “Take the Englishman, but take away the wig!”
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