Op-Ed: It Was a Blast to Interview Patrick Stewart

The death of Patrick Stewart has journalist Will Harris looking back on the day in 2010 when his lifelong Star Trek fixation collided with a professional assignment: interviewing the man behind Captain Jean-Luc Picard at a Television Critics Association press tour. Harris, who'd grown up glued to the original series in the 1970s and, later, the Next Generation, writes at Gizmodo that he remembers feeling like a "nervous wreck" before the interview, a feeling that quickly disappeared because Stewart was "instantly charming."

Most of their allotted 10 minutes was spent on Shakespeare—Stewart was promoting PBS productions of Hamlet and Macbeth—but Harris nudged the conversation toward Stewart's comedy work with Seth MacFarlane and on Saturday Night Live. The actor lit up and extended the interview, giving Harris a rush he still remembers to this day. "Picard may have famously said, 'What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived,'" writes Harris, but for fans, "what Stewart leaves behind is extremely important. ... and to borrow a line from a physician from a previous generation, he's not really gone as long as we remember him." Read the full tribute.

• The Washington Post is highlighting an interview Stewart gave to film critic Ann Hornaday in 2023. Hornaday died earlier this year.