At 12 years old in the dangerous world that I was in, with a very difficult home life, I found the stage was the safest place to be. It was predetermined and predictable – and furthermore you got to be someone else. All the problems only began when you left the building.
I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.
I don’t do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you!
It’s not just an exclamation, but it’s a rejection of everything to do with Christmas, with the spirit of Christmas, with gift-giving, with generosity.
I certainly wanted to maintain some sense of mystery about Picard and that’s why we never allowed certain situations to fully evolve, like the relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher.
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!
Roddenberry had created quite a complex and at times mysterious character. Guarded, cautious, careful in showing his feelings in expressing his ideas about many things – I found that very interesting.
Laurence Olivier said if you have ambition to be a serious classical actor, you must be as fit as an athlete. For me, the breakthrough was going to live in California. I exercised. I drank less. It was one of the things about California that had a positive impact on me.
For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.
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.
As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering.
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.
Tom Hanks knows the name of all the episodes.
The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they’re renegotiating contracts.
During my time we had two chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at different times of course, on the bridge, both of whom asked my permission to sit on the captain’s chair.
I’ve often reflected on this in the past weeks as I’ve been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.
Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain’s ready room died it was always a sad moment.
I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.
The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.
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.