Why Did Mel Brooks, Ricky Gervais and Seth MacFarlane All Want Patrick Stewart?
Somewhere between the Shakespeare and the starship, Patrick Stewart became one of the funniest people on screen, and he did it by never once winking. The joke was always the voice: that magnificent, cathedral-sized instrument, aimed at something ridiculous with total conviction. Mel Brooks saw it early. Ricky Gervais built an episode around it, and Seth MacFarlane kept hiring it for over a decade.
He hosted Saturday Night Live in 1994, while millions still knew him only as the captain of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the offers kept coming. He was nominated for Primetime Emmys for two guest comedy roles and a Golden Globe for a sitcom lead. The stage giant, it turns out, had perfect timing for filth.
Here is the funny side, from the thing to watch first to the thing to watch once.
Why Extras wins
Plenty of serious actors have sent themselves up. Almost none have done it this cheerfully. In the 2005 episode of Extras that carries his own name, Ricky Gervais's hapless Andy slips Stewart a sitcom script on the set of The Tempest, hoping for a leg up. Stewart, in return, pitches his own screenplay: a film in which he plays a man who can undress women with his mind. He describes it with the gravity of a man discussing Lear. That pairing, the noblest voice in British acting spent entirely on a schoolboy fantasy, is the purest version of his comic gift, and it earned him an Emmy nomination.
Blunt Talk is the one we will argue for hardest. Created by Jonathan Ames with Seth MacFarlane among the executive producers, it ran on Starz for 20 episodes across 2015 and 2016, with Stewart as Walter Blunt, a British newscaster in Los Angeles set on conquering American nightly cable news and sabotaging himself at every turn. Critics were split; the Rotten Tomatoes consensus complained that it "squanders Sir Patrick Stewart's considerable gifts." We think the opposite. Alongside Vicious, his ITV sitcom with Ian McKellen, it is the only place he got to be a comic lead for hours at a time, and his scenes with Adrian Scarborough as Harry, his loyal Falklands-veteran valet, play like a filthy, tender double act. The Golden Globes agreed enough to nominate him.
The ones that taught Hollywood
Before all that came the cameos. In Steve Martin's L.A. Story he is the maître d' at a restaurant called L'Idiot, a tiny part and an early sign that comedy people wanted that voice in the room. Two years later Mel Brooks saved him for the very end of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, where King Richard finally returns from the Crusades, halts a wedding and packs Prince John off to the Tower. Brooks hired the most regal man he could find and let him be regal in the silliest film of the year.
Jeffrey (1995) is the surprise. Paul Rudnick's AIDS-era comedy cast him as Sterling, a flamboyant interior decorator, and even the Rotten Tomatoes consensus that shrugged at the film singled him out: "an outstanding performance from Patrick Stewart keeps it from going completely off the rails." In Frasier's final season, in the 2003 episode "The Doctor Is Out", he played Alistair Burke, a high-profile opera director who assumes Frasier is gay and courts him, while Frasier enjoys being half of a power couple far too much to correct him. Second Emmy nomination.
MacFarlane's narrator
Then come the MacFarlane years. Stewart narrates Ted, MacFarlane's directing debut and a $549 million hit, and returned for Ted 2. He voiced characters across episodes of Family Guy, including a Picard cameo in the Star Wars send-up It's a Trap!, alongside his long run as Avery Bullock on American Dad!. And yes, he voiced Poop in The Emoji Movie, a "well-mannered poop emoji", a part Jordan Peele has said he was offered first. Stewart took it, and sounds delighted.
Where to start tonight
Watch the Extras episode first: it is half an hour and it explains everything. Then put on the Blunt Talk pilot, give it three episodes, and let Walter Blunt win you over the way he never quite wins over America.
