Patrick Stewart's career trajectory from the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1970s stage generation to Hollywood stardom is the stuff of legend. His Shakespearean training, combined with that sonorous voice and distinctive bald head, made him the natural successor to William Shatner's Captain James Kirk when he assumed the role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran from 1987 to 1994. The role catapulted him into the pop culture stratosphere, spawning four feature films and eventually another series, Star Trek: Picard. But while his portrayal of Picard showcased a more complex, thoughtful leader than Shatner's more action-romantic interpretation, it also risked typecast-ing one of Britain's finest classical actors into the realm of wholesome space exploration.
Stewart's subsequent move into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men franchise at the beginning of the 00s seemed like a natural progression of his already-established pop culture capital. Playing opposite fellow RSC alumnus Ian McKellen as Magneto, Stewart brought Shakespearean gravitas to the role of the wheelchair-using mentor to the mutants. The role allowed him to channel his classical background into a wise, kingly mien—think of an exiled monarch guiding his subjects through moral complexity. It was dignified work in prestigious franchises, but it was still fundamentally heroic, still fundamentally safe.
Yet Stewart had already demonstrated his range before both Star Trek and the X-Men films. His roles as King Leodegrance in John Boorman's Excalibur in 1981 and as Gurney Halleck in David Lynch's 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune proved he could inhabit worlds beyond the Federation starship and the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters.
But it was Jeremy Saulnier's horror-thriller Green Room that revealed the full depth of Stewart's capabilities. In that film, Stewart plays a neo-Nazi leader who, along with his brutish rank and file, attacks a rock band barricaded in the green room of a scuzzy bar. Here, Stewart was given permission to be vehemently and compellingly bad in ways that Star Trek and Marvel never demanded. His face could transform into a threatening mask—handsome and refined one moment, leonine and aggressive the next. That mellifluous voice delivered a nasal edge of threat that chilled the audience.
It's a shame that Stewart's most celebrated roles came in franchises that asked him to be heroic and wise. Green Room proved that Stewart was a truly unique charismatic force on screen precisely because he could do the opposite: he could embody genuine menace, genuine evil, with all the nuance his classical training afforded him. Perhaps his legacy should remind us that even the greatest pop culture icons deserve the chance to explore the darker corners of the human character.