Patrick Stewart’s Baldness Almost Became A Hurdle In Landing His Iconic Captain Picard Role In Star Trek

At the age of 17, Patrick Stewart was a drama student in Bristol with a problem he couldn’t act his way out of. The thick, dark, wavy hair he grew up with was disappearing fast. 

The future X-Men and Star Trek star took extra work as a bricklayer near his family home in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, to pay for treatment at a Bristol hair clinic. However, the money bought him very little. “But it was hopeless,” he later wrote in his memoir, Making It So, and by 19, he was as bald on top as he was till he breathed his last.

Patrick Stewart Went Bald At A Young Age

The hurt was real. “I got very depressed about it,” Patrick told Rolling Stone, worried that his love life was over before it started. He told Conan O’Brien’s podcast that “Losing my hair felt like a failure.” He even tried the comb-over, a look he would surely disown later in his career.

Still, the young actor was already picking up a useful lesson. Stewart saw that baldness could work in his favor in the arts, even if it made dating harder. Being bald made him hard to pigeonhole, and he could easily play older characters on stage.

Patrick Stewart’s Star Trek Audition & Wig Story

The big test came in 1987, when Patrick auditioned to lead ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was not an easy sell. Producer Rick Berman said Roddenberry disliked the idea of “a bald English guy taking over” from William Shatner. Roddenberry agreed to a final audition only if Stewart wore a wig, so a hairpiece was flown in from London.

It didn’t last. In the version of the story most people tell, Roddenberry heard Stewart read in the wig and asked him to take it off, saying hair meant nothing in the 25th century. Stewart got the part, and the wig was dropped. Apart from three episodes showing Picard as a young man, he never wore one again.

Roddenberry’s later reply to a doubtful reporter became part of the legend. Asked whether baldness wouldn’t have been cured by the 24th century, according to looper he said, “By the 24th Century, no one will care.” The public came around much sooner than that. In 1992, a TV Guide poll named Stewart the “Sexiest Man on Television.”

Why Patrick Stewart’s Bald Look Became His Signature?

The look stuck with him. His shaved head defined Captain Jean-Luc Picard across seven seasons, four films, and the later Picard series. It was just as tied to Professor X in the X-Men films, since the character is bald in the comics. Stewart wasn’t actually bald in the way those roles suggested, and he had said he shaved his head every day.

The social order he feared flipped too. He pointed out that men with great heads of hair were now shaving them off. At home, he said his wife, musician Sunny Ozell, admitted she had always been drawn to bald men, which led to his joke, “Oh, at last!”

The point isn’t that Stewart beat hair loss. He lost that fight early, and it cost him. What he gained was a look that casting directors, fans, and eventually the man who created Star Trek came to see as his signature. The wig that once crossed the Atlantic is now a footnote, and the head he meant to hide became the one everyone remembers.

For more such stories, check out Hollywood News.

Must Read: Matthew Perry Almost Lost His Iconic Friends Role As Chandler Because Of A Failed TV Pilot

Follow Us: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Google News