Patrick Stewart Was 85 When He Agreed to Voice a Talking Pig's Head
By his seventies, Patrick Stewart owned two of the most beloved characters in popular culture, and he kept taking risks anyway. Between the big returns (yes, Logan and Star Trek: Picard are covered elsewhere in this issue), he kept signing up for small, odd, sometimes uncomfortable films that nobody needed him to make. A two-hander adapted from a play. A punk-rock siege. A wedding farce. A children's Arthurian quest.
Go back through them now and a pattern shows up: he kept choosing parts that let him be less admirable than Picard and less wise than Xavier.
The quiet ones
Match premiered at Tribeca in 2014. Stephen Belber adapted it from his own 2004 play, and Stewart plays Tobi Powell, a former dancer now teaching ballet at Juilliard. A married couple, played by Carla Gugino and Matthew Lillard, come to interview him for research, and the conversation slowly stops being about dance. Stewart is flamboyant, funny, vain and then, without warning, terribly exposed. It is a small film and it looks like one, but it is the closest thing on screen to watching him carry a stage play on his own.
Coda runs on a similar engine. He plays Sir Henry Cole, an acclaimed concert pianist near the end of his career, back on the stage after his wife's death and frozen by stage fright. Katie Holmes is Helen Morrison, a writer for The New Yorker, and the film follows the two of them all the way up to Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps.
The fun ones
Not every gamble was a heavy one. In The Wilde Wedding he is Harold, the writer about to become Glenn Close's fourth husband, while John Malkovich turns up as her first. Three veterans trading barbs at a country wedding: not deep, very watchable.
Joe Cornish's The Kid Who Would Be King gave him Merlin, or rather the adult Merlin, sharing the wizard with a much younger actor. A London schoolboy pulls Excalibur out of concrete on a building site, and Stewart drifts through the film like a grandfather who happens to be ancient and slightly alarming. Later that year, in Elizabeth Banks's Charlie's Angels, he played John Bosley, a retired senior operative of the agency. The film gives him more to do than a retirement party.
He kept going right to the end. In 2026 he voiced Sir Richfield, an elderly ram, in The Sheep Detectives, with Hugh Jackman as the shepherd George Hardy, and in Riz Ahmed's Prime Video series Bait he is the voice of a severed pig's head that speaks the hero's self-doubt out loud. Few actors at 85 take that call.
The one we would put above them all
Green Room premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2015. A punk band, the Ain't Rights, plays a gig at a neo-Nazi skinhead bar in the woods near Portland, witnesses a murder backstage and gets locked in. Stewart is Darcy Banker, the bar's owner and the leader of the skinheads. He plays him with an awful calm, discussing what to do with the band the way a manager might handle a scheduling problem, and that calm is what makes the film so frightening. Seattle film critics nominated him for best villain, and Imogen Poots is terrific opposite him, but it is still the Stewart performance most of his fans have never seen. It is the best thing he did on film in his last decade outside a wheelchair or a starship.
Where to start tonight
If you can handle real tension, start with Green Room, and watch how little Stewart does to dominate every scene. If you want something gentler, Match is the better first step and the purest showcase of his stage craft. If there are kids on the sofa, put on The Kid Who Would Be King and enjoy him as Merlin.
