For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.
I am told that there have been over the years a number of experiments taking place in places like Massachusetts Institute of Technology that have been entirely based on concepts raised by Star Trek.
I began directing episodes, which was a great light every couple of months. We never short-changed our audience, but it became something that you had to work at rather than something that was a pleasure.
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.
Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.
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.
Violence against women is learned. Each of us must examine – and change – the way in which our own behavior might contribute to, enable, ignore or excuse all such forms of violence. I promise to do so, and to invite other me and allies to do the same.
We’ve heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.
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.
Where can I go that would give me the same level of satisfaction as an actor?
I made a promise to myself that I would try to introduce something unexpected in every single episode of the series. It was largely to amuse myself as much as anything. I didn’t ever want the audience to feel that they knew everything.
I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I’d thought about from time to time, but it was completely unrealistic.
It still frightens me a little bit to think that so much of my life was totally devoted to Star Trek and almost nothing else.
I wasn’t campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you’ve got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time.
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.
One of the things that I’ve come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I’m talking about myself.
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.
There’s no such thing as “just a domestic”.
I do what I do in my mother’s name because I couldn’t help her then. Now I can.
William Shatner has one style. We have completely contrasting personalities. We’re very good friends. I adore him, but we’re very different people, so they were smart enough to write characters that reflected that.
If someone says ‘Give me one word of advice,’ I say ‘be fearless.’ And knowing without any shadow of a doubt that what they have to give – who they are – is totally unique and not shared by anybody else. And to believe in that uniqueness. It took me decades before I developed courage as an actor.