This one hurts. Patrick Stewart — Captain Picard on Star Trek, Professor X in the X-Men movies, the very embodiment of thoughtful heroism and leadership for several generations of pop culture fans — passed away this week at the age of 86.
It’s a terrible loss, but there is some small consolation in the fact that Stewart leaves behind a great body of work, much of which is currently available to stream at home. Here are a few of his many career highlights — and where to find them.
Dune (1984)
Currently streaming on Tubi
In one of his earliest Hollywood roles, Stewart plays Gurney, the mentor and trainer to Paul Atreides in David Lynch’s Dune. (Josh Brolin plays the role in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy.) Stewart’s most famous later roles were typically pacifists and statesmen; those who led with their words and their morals, rather than their fists. So it can be a little surprising to see him suddenly unsheathe a knife and go after a young Kyle MacLachlan. Lynch���s Dune can often bewilder viewers who aren’t familiar with Frank Herbert’s book or its terminology, but Stewart’s sturdy performance provides a steadying presence.
Star Trek: The Next Generation – “The Inner Light” (1992)
Currently streaming on Paramount+
Paramount+ is the home to all of Star Trek, so if you want to have yourself a full-blown Next Generation binge, that’s where to boldly go. If you only want to watch one episode to sample why Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard was so beloved, watch his work in the haunting Season 5 episode “The Inner Light,” in which the Captain of the Enterprise is mysteriously transported by an energy beam to a faraway planet, where he’s informed by everyone around him that he’s actually a humble agrarian worker. He pushes back, insisting he’s a starship captain, but gradually he comes to accept his life as “Kamin” — as years and then decades pass.
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Currently streaming on Paramount+
On the flip side of that quiet, contemplative episode, Stewart gave one of his most bombastic performances as Picard in the best of the Next Generation movies, 1996’s First Contact. The Enterprise crew travels back into the past, where they battle the techno-alien menace of the Borg and work to restore the timestream and the first-ever use of a warp drive for interstellar travel. Picard holds an understandable grudge against the Borg for the time they forcefully assimilated him. Stewart, in turn, gets to turn the typically stately Picard into a torrent of rage, giving us several very memorable scenes like this one.
A Christmas Carol (1999)
Currently available on YouTube
Stewart loved Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol and performed it on stage many times as a one-man show. Here he stars in a TV movie version of the classic holiday tale. In 2019, he said of his love of the show: “I believe that the world I’m in now has never been so troubled and dark a place. I’m a war baby. I was born in 1940, so I have some experience of the sounds of war. My father was away for the first five years of my life. I never knew who he was until he came home in 1945. But the times we’re living through now are exceptional and alarming. I felt that there was an opportunity here to say something about that.”
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Currently streaming on Disney+
Stewart did fine work in all of his X-Men movies, often in scenes opposite the great Ian McKellen as Magneto. But his most poignant moment in the franchise may be his encounter with his younger self (played by James McAvoy), where he pushes him to reject cynicism and to embrace the notion that peace can be achieved between humanity and mutantkind. “It’s not their pain you’re afraid of. It’s yours Charles,” Stewart whispers in that incredible voice of his. “And as frightening as it may be, that pain will make you stronger, if you allow yourself to feel it.”
Green Room (2015)
Currently streaming on Netflix
Stewart projected such innate goodness — or maybe he became so linked with heroic roles like Captain Picard — that he rarely strayed into more villainous territory in his later years. A rare exception is his work as the leader of a group of Neo-Nazis that try to kill the members of a punk band who witness a murder at a rock club. Talk about range; he is just as terrifying and sinister as Green Room’s Darcy as he is noble and dignified as Picard.
Logan (2017)
Currently streaming on Disney+
Logan was originally meant as the final farewell for Fox’s X-Men saga, and Stewart’s work as the aging Professor X — once the greatest telepathic mind in the world, now stricken with dementia — is one of the most moving performances in any superhero movie. Now that Stewart himself has passed away after, as his loved ones put it in their statement about his death, “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia,” this film, and Stewart’s work in it, becomes almost unfathomably sad.
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