Patrick Stewart is currently promoting his memoir, Making It So. A lot of it seems to be about his time on Star Trek, and he tells many stories admitting his own poor behavior on and off set. You can read some excerpts about that here – basically, he’s admitting that he had a really prissy attitude and he needed to learn how to loosen up, especially as he was working with so many Americans. But it turns out, he completely glosses over one of the most interesting parts of his life at that time: he was living in a haunted house.
One interesting non-Trek anecdote was about a house in Los Angeles that Stewart owned, which he firmly became convinced was haunted.
“Yes, it was haunted,” Stewart recalls. “There was no question about that. There were phenomena present in that house that could not be explained and that I experienced and were experienced by others. My son, one day, was home from college and alone in the house and all of a sudden all the books in a bookshelf were thrown across the room. This upset him so badly that he left the house and waited outside until I came home.
“After I moved out of the house,” he continued, “not because of the haunting — although it had become bothersome with noises, footsteps on stairs, voices in rooms that were empty and feelings of temperature changes and so forth. I rented the house to a family and one day the mother called me up and said, ‘You didn’t tell us all the other things that came with your house.’ She and her family have been experiencing the same things that I experienced!”
Imagine confessing all of these detailed anecdotes about Star Trek and then tossing off the fact that you were living in a massively haunted house at the same time. “It had become bothersome with noises, footsteps on stairs, voices in rooms that were empty and feelings of temperature changes and so forth” AND SO FORTH! Like, “yes there were several ghosts and they were really angry, but back to this one episode of Star Trek…” Tell us more about the haunted house, damn. I want to know how many people experienced the hauntings. I could tell some stories! I already told one of my big stories on the podcast, about the phantom banging on the door on the one year anniversary of my father’s passing. That scared the sh-t out of me. I wouldn’t be able to handle sustained creepy sh-t in one house though.
He also told a story about working with Tom Hardy on Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002, before Tom became a big star. Patrick writes that Hardy was “an odd, solitary young man from London” who “wouldn’t engage with any of us on a social level. Never said, ‘Good morning,’ never said, ‘Goodnight,’ and spent the hours he wasn’t needed on set in his trailer with his girlfriend…He was by no means hostile — it was just challenging to establish any rapport with him.” When Tom wrapped on the film, he just walked away with no ceremony, no goodbyes, no nothing.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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- HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 09: Sir Patrick Stewart arrives for the Los Angeles premiere of the third and final season of Paramount ’s original series “Star Trek: Picard” held at TCL Chinese Theatre on February 09, 2023 in Hollywood, California.,Image: 755257629, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Pictured: Sir Patrick Stewart, Credit line: Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon
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- HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 09: Sir Patrick Stewart arrives for the Los Angeles premiere of the third and final season of Paramount ’s original series “Star Trek: Picard” held at TCL Chinese Theatre on February 09, 2023 in Hollywood, California.,Image: 755257753, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Pictured: Sir Patrick Stewart, Credit line: Jeffrey Mayer / Avalon
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- Patrick Stewart photographed at The 2023 EE BAFTA Film Awards Arrivals at the Royal Festival Hall in London, UK on 19 February 2023.,Image: 757152767, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Julie Edwards / Avalon
