Beyond Picard and Xavier: Patrick Stewart's Darker, Stranger and Stage Roles

Ask a casual viewer what Patrick Stewart did besides Star Trek and X-Men, and you will often get a short list. The longer answer is stranger and better: a Soviet spymaster, a Roman schemer, a whaling captain, a murderous Scottish king, a skinhead boss in a Pacific Northwest club. This guide follows that other career, mostly through the roles that are easiest to find and the stage work that shaped him. For the franchises themselves, see our career guide.

Green Room (2015)

The most striking turn of his later career is Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, released in the United States by A24 on April 15, 2016. A24’s film page describes a band trapped after witnessing a crime. Stewart plays Darcy Banker, the controlled, courteous man who runs the people the band cannot escape.

The film works partly because it makes a familiar presence frightening. Audiences who knew him as Picard had a built-in trust for that voice, and Saulnier turns it against them. Stewart does not raise his volume or change his manner to signal menace. The calm itself is the threat.

Macbeth

Stewart played the title role in Rupert Goold’s production of Macbeth, which began at Chichester in 2007, moved to the West End’s Gielgud Theatre and then to Broadway in 2008, where it earned him a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play. A filmed version premiered on PBS’s Great Performances on October 6, 2010, with Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth. PBS’s page describes the stage production as Tony-nominated.

Goold’s production sets the story in a modern, institutional world, and the film carries the stage production’s staging into a different form. It is one of the most accessible ways to see Stewart doing Shakespeare at full intensity.

Hamlet, Shylock and the Royal Shakespeare Company

The Royal Shakespeare Company says Stewart joined in 1966. The official Olivier Awards records show how his stage career developed. He won the 1979 Olivier for Actor of the Year in a Supporting Role for Antony and Cleopatra. In 2009, he won the Olivier for Best Performance in a Supporting Role for the RSC’s Hamlet at the Novello Theatre, where he played Claudius and the Ghost opposite David Tennant. A television version aired on BBC Two on December 26, 2009, and the Hollywood Reporter notes an Emmy nomination in 2010 for his work in it.

He also won the 1994 Olivier for Best Entertainment as the adapter and stager of A Christmas Carol, the one-man show he performed at the Old Vic. That is a production award, not an acting prize, so it should not be counted among his acting wins.

Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land

In later years Stewart returned to the stage alongside Ian McKellen. They appeared together in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and in 2013 took Godot and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land to Broadway’s Cort Theatre in repertory. No Man’s Land returned to London’s Wyndham’s Theatre in 2016.

Before Star Trek: Sejanus, Karla and Gurney Halleck

Stewart’s early screen credits are a quiet argument for how much he could do before he was famous. In 1976 he played Sejanus in the BBC’s I, Claudius. He played the Soviet spymaster Karla in the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982). He appeared in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985), and in David Lynch’s Dune (1984) he played Gurney Halleck.

Moby Dick and A Christmas Carol on screen

In 1998 he played Captain Ahab in a US miniseries of Moby Dick on USA Network, directed by Franc Roddam, and was nominated for both an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Gregory Peck played Father Mapple. The production did not win either award, so he should not be described as a Golden Globe winner for it.

A year later, in 1999, TNT broadcast a television film of A Christmas Carol, first aired on December 5, 1999. Stewart played Scrooge and was an executive producer. It is separate from his stage version.

Where to start

If you want a single film, start with Green Room. If you want the stage work, Macbeth is the easiest to find. If you want to see how long he had been doing this before Star Trek, begin with I, Claudius or Smiley’s People. We have also put together a list of twenty titles that spans the whole career. Our tribute covers the announcement of his death on October 29, 2026.