Make It So: Sir Patrick Stewart On Surviving Trauma, Staying Engaged & Lessons From The Artist Life

Beloved icon of stage and screen, my guest today is the singular Sir Patrick Stewart. The knighted Shakespeare thespian, captain of the Starship Enterprise, international treasure, and master storyteller is here and brings conversational delights lifted from 83 years of life. Today Patrick shares tales from his humble beginnings, how theatre saved him, and how childhood trauma informed his career and led to his passion for mental health advocacy. We also discuss legacy, longevity, honing your craft, the importance of mentorship, and his unique friendship with Sir Ian McKellen. We of course dive into some epic Star Trek stories and explore why the series is so indelible—which naturally led to thoughts on UFOs and the ghost that he is absolutely convinced took up residence in his Silverlake home. The occasion for today’s exchange is Patrick’s brand new memoir, Making It So—an excellent read that traces the improbable story of his life from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire, England, to the heights of Hollywood and worldwide acclaim. They say never meet your heroes. I disagree. As a long-time Trekkie, this was a pinch-me moment. It was an absolute pleasure and honor to talk with a man I respect and admire tremendously. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: ROKA: Roka.com/RICHROLL Peak Design: peakdesign.com/RICHROLL AG1: DrinkAG1.com/RICHROLL Inside Tracker x Hydrow: fitnessfuelslongevity.com Modern Elder Academy: meawisdom.com Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  On screen. There are many great resonances about being an actor. One of my first attractions to acting was that I could forget about Patrick Stewart. To not be Patrick Stewart, if only for a few hours a week, was such a relief. And there was a price to pay for that.

• 1:34Rich Roll?

  The knighted Shakespearean captain of the Starship Enterprise, international treasure and master storyteller is here in the house. And he brings with him conversational delights lifted from his 83 years of life. We have tales from his humble beginnings. We talk about how the theater saved him and how childhood trauma informed his career, which of course led us into a deep dive on mental health generally and his passion for mental health advocacy. We also talk about friendship, particularly the nature of his beautiful friendship with

• 2:11Rich Roll?

  Sir Ian McKellen. We discuss legacy, longevity, craft, mentorship, and why Star Trek is just so indelible, which of course led to brief thoughts on UFOs, and also this incredible story about the ghosts that he is absolutely convinced took up residence in his Silverlake home. All of these stories and themes are more fully elaborated in Sir Patrick's wonderful new memoir, Making It So. As a longtime Trekkie, this one was a dream. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. So here we go. This is me and Sir Patrick.

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  You look amazing. I'm thrilled to have you here. You don't look a day older than you look in Star Trek: Next Generation. I want to know what your longevity secrets are. You're so spry and with it and funny and present and fit. There's got to be some secrets.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Work.

• 3:14Rich Roll?

  That's it? Staying plugged in?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Well, it has been for me in that life, as opposed to work, can get quite complicated in our business. The hours are long. You could be anywhere in any corner of the world. I came from a very work-conscious background. My father was proud of what he did, even though, as you may have seen in the book, that he, the highlight of his career was Second World War. Ten years in India in the 20s. The moment he heard my mother was pregnant, he took off.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  And he ended his military career at the end of 1945 as a regimental sergeant major of the parachute regiment. And that meant everything to him. He was very, very proud of that. One day, a guy, just after my father died, he um

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I met him in a pub. And he said, I know you. You're Alf Stewart's son. And I said, yeah, that's right. And he said, your dad, you know, when he walked on a parade ground, the birds and the trees stopped singing.

• 4:41Rich Roll?

  What do you make of that? What does that mean?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Presence, I think. I mean, I know what it means as an actor. That I I know mostly that from watching other actors. You know, somebody walks on stage and you go, oh, my God. Now, I don't know why that happens, but there is a there is a focus, a concentration, um, and intensity.

• 5:06Rich Roll?

  A gravitas.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Objectives.

• 5:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  That make them. And other people, eh, you know, you forget they're there.

• 5:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. No, you know those people when they walk into the room. The the the sense of weight and charisma and gravitas that he obviously earned and and what you just shared. Uh, you know, has a sensibility of of kind of reverence and and respect for who he was. But he was a he was a challenging guy as well. He was not a he was not an easy guy to grow up underneath.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Oh, no. I I mean, he first came home when I was about 15 months old, and I have no recollection of that.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  And one more time, I think in 1943, he came home when I was probably four. And I just have memories of a man in a uniform, looking kind of exciting, I thought, at the time. No, the problems began when the war ended. And um, his his colonel said, so what are you going to do, Sergeant, when uh? You know, when you get back home and my father said, oh, I will get a job. And he said, well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. And he explained that uh, he had contact at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Now, the Dorchester is one of the

• 6:31Speaker 01

  top four or five hotels, historic hotels in London.

• 6:35Rich Roll?

  Famous for its high tea.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. Which, by the way, I recommend.

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  Done it once.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  If you've done it once, good for you. Yeah, Americans love it. It's great. And he said they are, there is a vacancy coming up in a few weeks for a doorman, an assistant doorman. But the doorman is going to be retiring in two years' time. And his job would be yours. And he's, and my father said, wow, that's great. And there was a, an apartment that came with the job in the hotel.

• 7:15Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  They said, you're married, aren't you? And he said, yes. And they said, well, we'll employ your wife, too. She could get a job in the hotel as well. I mean, it sounded wonderful.

• 7:27Rich Roll?

  And yet.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  My wife, yeah, my wife, his wife, my mother said, no, I'm not leaving West Yorkshire. This had been my home all her life, and it had, it had. In fact, the little town we lived in, a population of 9,000.

• 7:41Rich Roll?

  And it has its own wild dialect that's indecipherable to most of us, right?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  He doesn't know what that's talking about.

• 7:51Rich Roll?

  The and thou and like, yeah, I mean, it's pretty crazy, the way that you grew up speaking.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I was not allowed to say thee and thou to my father, though.

• 8:02Rich Roll?

  Why? It was a disrespect.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  But I, I mean, as a, as a child, playing and, you know, you could say to people, oh, thee, which was always critical in some way. Or, or tha was, was the way that we shortened it. That doesn't understand, lad. You know, that, that don't know, that doesn't know what they're talking about. So there was this semi-ancient speech that was ours. And in fact, I spoke a strong dialect when I was a child and.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I don't talk like that anymore.

• 10:43Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Back to your dad a little bit. I mean, you spoke about, you know, some of the things that he did in World War II. I mean, this was a guy who, you know, ended up, I think, was he airlifted out of Cherbourg, like around Dunkirk, right?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:58Rich Roll?

  So this guy had done a lot. He's parachuting into Crete and like doing some, some pretty ballsy, crazy stuff. But he comes home, finds himself back in Yorkshire. And, you know, it's pretty, it's pretty easy to kind of identify what was going on with him now, given what we understand about what happens with veterans when they return from conflict zones.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:21Rich Roll?

  But at that time, it was just shell shock. Nobody understood it. And of course, with that, there's domestic violence, there's alcohol abuse and, you know, a whole, you know, array of sordid behaviors that you were on the kind of receiving end of as a, as a young person.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yes. At the hands of my father, unlike my headmaster, I didn't receive personally any violence. He would raise his hand several times, and the moment that he did that, I would freeze and become something that he wasn't going to hit. He beat my brother. And he did it in front of me and my brother, who was five years older than me. I was the baby of the family. And it was appalling.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And, I mean, I've only subsequently learned, I, I did a television program for the BBC quite a few years ago now, and, and they had a specialist of PTSD on the show. And he'd, he'd been told about my father, and then he talked to me and he said, he was ill. And if it's possible at all for you to allow that to become part of your recollection of your unpleasant childhood, he was sick and could not control himself. So it was a mental condition as much as anything. And he was angry and...

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I always thought that once I heard this story about the Dorchester Hotel, that he was, he never ceased to be angry with my mother because he knew that that job would have been perfect for him. Because he was smart. He had conversation and he could talk. He had language and then he had this dialect, which was, people loved to hear. They thought it was charming. He would have been a star, standing in the front door of the Dorchester Hotel.

• 13:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so he held on to a certain resentment, took out his frustration on the people that he cared about. And it's, it's interesting to hear you share that because with that realization that this was an illness, that he was a victim of something he had no control over, allows you to then have compassion, not only for your mother as a, as a, you know, victim of domestic abuse, but also for the perpetrator, um, to have some kind of empathy for why he ended up behaving that way, which in turn gives you a certain freedom. You're liberated from holding on to your anger around that. And I know it wasn't, I mean, I don't think you shared that publicly until maybe

• 14:16Rich Roll?

  2010 or something like that. You held on to that for a long time.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. For a very long time. I was ashamed. And I was ashamed that I couldn't impact what was so awful about my home life. I, I couldn't change it.

• 14:35Rich Roll?

  Did you blame yourself?

• 14:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And I know that my elder brother did.

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah, because you were the younger. If anyone was gonna feel like he needed to, you know, make it better for you, it would be him.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  He was, and he, he, he only died last year.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And he took care of me. And if ever I was at any risk, he would protect me. And then, as I got older and I wanted to do all the things he did, play soccer with him and his friends, play cricket with him and his friends. And of course, he didn't want his kid brother to be hanging out with us at all because he was five years older than me, they all were, you know. And he nevertheless always had an eye for me. And I only went into therapy.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  About the 90s. I'd never done it.

• 15:43Rich Roll?

  What was the revelation of engaging with therapy?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Well, one of the things I learned was how to listen. Because she mostly listened. I mean, when she did talk, she would say, "Tell me. How? In what way?" And so that she was always inviting me to contribute the conversations. But then, as my time with her, and it was for several years, went on. We began to talk about mental issues, mental disturbances, bouts of anger, I still occasionally get them. And I know, I know where it comes from.

• 16:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  It happened only a few days ago, I'm ashamed to say. And...

• 16:35Rich Roll?

  Well, I had read that there was an article a couple of years ago that said that at eight, you're 83 now, right? At 80, you were still in therapy. Are you still in therapy now?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  No, I'm not.

• 16:49Rich Roll?

  You're not.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Except...

• 16:51Rich Roll?

  Cured, except for the occasional angry outburst.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  They don't happen very often. They're quite rare, I'm relieved to say.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  But, no, I have two therapists now. But I see them when I feel that there is a need, rather than it's not a daily or weekly event for me.

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  I'm interested in the relationship between that childhood dynamic and your burgeoning relationship with the theatre. It feels like the theatre is really what saved you. Finding yourself amongst a community of like-minded people at an early age becomes this true salvation for your life. And you had a couple instrumental teachers and mentors that kind of guided you and nudged you in that direction, saw something in you very early on.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  There are many, for me, great resonances about being an actor.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And one of the strongest is the people I encounter. Finding that there were in the world other young people, and some of them significantly older, who felt the same kind of isolation that I felt. And yet, in the company of actors, there was an almost intuitive connection that was made between us. And I was 12 years old when I first was dumped into a large group of actors on a course that was run. It was a brand-new course run by the West Riding County Council in Yorkshire.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  And the minimum age was 14. And it was in my headmaster's office that I met a man called Gerald Tyler. He's in the book. And he had come to say that the county council were going to run an eight-day theatre course, a residential theatre course. By that, it meant we had camp beds to lie on in school classrooms. But nevertheless, from the moment that I arrived there, I was in the company. Of people like me. Now, some of them were highly educated. I mean, I got a big crush

• 19:25Speaker 01

  on a girl who was at grammar school, but it didn't work out.

• 19:30Rich Roll?

  Just not having anything to do with you.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  No, no. And, and yet, it was our love of acting, performing, of plays, scripts, texts, being in front of an audience, which never scared me, ever at all. And there was a reason for this. One of my first attractions to acting was that I could forget about Patrick Stewart.

• 20:02Rich Roll?

  Right. That was my next question. How much of this, aside from finding like-minded people in this tribe of young artists, how much of it was an escape from your own life? Or the opportunity to step outside who you were and just become somebody altogether different as a defense mechanism and not having to deal with whatever pain is kind of lingering in your subconscious?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  You explain it perfectly.

• 20:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  That's exactly how it was. To not be Patrick Stewart, if only for a few hours a week, was such a relief. To explore being someone other than myself with a different background. I mean, the first role that I played, other than this, this thing that we'd done about the history of Yorkshire and Merfield where I grew up, was a comedy called The Happiest Days of Your Life. You may have encountered it very occasionally, it crops up in theatre very occasionally. And it was all set in a private boys' school,

• 21:16Speaker 01

  a rather exclusive private boys' school. And it was wartime, and a private girls' school had been found places in the school. So there were now boys and girls playing there. And I played a character, you see, I remember his name, called Hopcroft Minor. He had an older brother who was Hopcroft. And

• 21:42Speaker 01

  And it was such a joy to be playing an upper-class child. Even though I struggled with the accent, I didn't really have a proper received pronunciation accent until I was fifteen or sixteen. But I was learning. And sometimes it made people laugh when they heard me speak because it sounded so portentous and, you know. So, becoming someone else, that was the main attraction.

• 22:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  And I could forget who Patrick Stewart was.

• 22:20Rich Roll?

  But, but not with any self-awareness around that. It's not as if you understood, I mean, a young person wouldn't, wouldn't be expected to understand that, "Oh, I'm doing this because I'm trying to, you know, get away from this other thing." But you do have a moment when, when you were doing the Macbeth rendering that was set in a Cold War era, where you connected the dots between your, your kind of actor sensibility and this character that you were inhabiting, tracing it back to your father. Do you know the story I'm, I'm referring to?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. It was a great invitation to be offered, that role, by a wonderful actor called Rupert Gould, who was just starting out then but is now very well-established in the UK. And he's done a couple of films as well. We both felt that, I mean, if you're interested in the theatre, you know who Macbeth is and what he did. So, we wanted to put him into a context in which what he was, was understandable. And that was intriguing.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  And I, I did go and talk to a lot of people and about the, because he is, Macbeth is ill and gets iller as the play goes on.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  You remember the story I told in the book about running into Ian McKellen in the

• 23:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  in the Charing Cross Road one day and he said, "So, how's it going, Macbeth?" And, oh God, I was so uncomfortable because Ian was the Macbeth of my generation. Him and Judi Dench, who played Lady Macbeth. I saw that production and Trevon directed it and it was amazing. And the cast just sat in a circle around a quite small studio stage and just stood up when their turn came. So it had an intimacy about it. But, and then Ian said to me, "Oh, if I can, there's just one thing I'd like to mention about playing Macbeth."

• 24:40Speaker 01

  And I said, "Anything at all, please." And he said, "Okay. The line that begins the famous speech, 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,' creeps in this petty pace from day to day." He said, "The most important word in that first line is 'and.'" And I had it in a flash. I knew exactly what he meant.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty... And you're rolling then, you're rolling. And it was...

• 25:22Rich Roll?

  He unlocked it. He unlocked it for you.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Oh, not just that speech, but it spread into the rest of the play. And I knew that Macbeth was inside me.

• 25:41Rich Roll?

  But it's when you dress up in the costuming of the character and look in the mirror and you have this epiphany.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  The first dress rehearsal, I'd grown a mustache, quite a heavyweight mustache, unlike my father's, who had a, you know, very, very narrow, small, Sergeant Major's mustache. And I was in uniform, and it was the end of a battle, we were coming from a battle, myself and Banquo, and I had an overcoat on, and I had a military cap pulled down over my face, and a rifle slung over my shoulder. And I was just getting these things on, the dresser was helping me, and then she said, "Oh, have a look in the mirror, see what you think."

• 26:36Speaker 01

  And my father was looking back at me, unmistakable, him. And it gave me quite a shock, but then I saw the advantage of it. I knew him. He wasn't inside me, other than he had been my father. And that allowed me to embrace him and bring him in, and feel about him, both his rages and his fear and his sadness, and the pain that he'd had, because he'd had, he'd been wounded several times, fortunately never very seriously.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  But he had been wounded, and of course, he jumped out of airplanes.

• 27:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, just fascinating from the perspective of kind of unconsciously inhabiting this character, and then finally realizing, like, oh, this is what I was doing, you know? And, and being able to connect with that and develop a greater understanding of this complicated person.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:41Rich Roll?

  And, and also, understanding that, on some level, he contributed to your skill as an actor through that process.

• 27:50Rich Roll?

  Is kind of amazing.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  I wish that I could have told him exactly what you said.

• 27:56Rich Roll?

  He got to see you succeed. He passed away shortly before Next Generation, though, is that right?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yes, he did. And he would have loved Next Generation, particularly that I was Captain Picard.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Because he was always a non-commissioned officer, although he became the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer. He was a Field Marshal of non-commissioned officers.

• 28:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you playing a military officer with with with great integrity would have appealed to him.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it it really would. But then, you know, as time went by, I discovered that there was an under-the-covers aspects to Picard as well. And when we came to do the new series, Picard, we really examined that because the writers and directors were very interested in uncovering a man that we had seen almost nothing of. There was one scene in one episode when I screamed, I yelled at a woman, I threw something at a glass-fronted, I don't know,

• 29:09Speaker 01

  cocktail cabinet or something and shattered it. And and and this was shocking for people. They'd never seen Jean-Luc Picard like this. But I knew how to do it.

• 29:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  And

• 29:22Rich Roll?

  It's inside you. It was inside you the whole time. Yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  It's and there was a price to pay for that.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  In rehearsals, I just delved into all of that and put it into the role.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  By then, I'd had two divorces and

• 29:50Speaker 01

  I was to blame for both of them.

• 29:53Rich Roll?

  I watched the first episode of Picard from season one the other night. And I was really struck by, there's that scene where you're being interviewed. And your buttons get pushed and then the, you know, the, you kind of unleash, right? And it reminded me of, it was very similar to the Jack Nicholson Sorkin scene in A Few Good Men, Colonel Jessup, you know, being provoked just enough to let the lion out, you know, like, you, you know, basically your version of saying, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall, like, did you order the code red? You're goddamn right, I ordered the code red.

• 30:36Rich Roll?

  Like, that speech that you give is very resonant of, it reminded me of that in there. And it's like, that, there's that latent, you know, not necessarily anger, a little self-righteousness earned through experience.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:51Rich Roll?

  The other, the other kind of example of that for me was when you did, when you were Leontes in Winter's Tale, right? Which is kind of a watershed moment in you kind of reckoning with your past.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yes, it was. And it was very challenging when I read the play, first of all. I'd seen the play and found it interesting, but not, it didn't appeal to me in the way that so much of Shakespeare did. One day, I was in the green room of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, I was working there. And I had, I'd been made this offer of Leontes in The Winter's Tale. And sitting alone at a table was Dame Peggy Ashcroft, whom I didn't know, but she was a member of the company, but I wasn't in the play she was in. And I said, Dame Peggy, may I, may I sit by you?

• 31:50Speaker 01

  And she said, yes, of course, come on, sit down. And, and we had a chat. And I said, look, I've got to ask you this. I've been offered Leontes in Winter's Tale, and I saw her face change straight away. And I said, I-

• 32:07Speaker 01

  I I I don't know what to do about it. I and and could you give me any help or advice? And she said, turn it down.

• 32:14Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Don't do it. Don't do it. He's a bad, bad man, and nobody likes him. The audience don't like him because he's vile to everybody. There's nobody who's on his side, except of course, there's one good friend whom he kills. And um I I I I said to her, thank you. You've articulated what I think I was feeling, so that's great. And then the director said, well, have you made a decision? And I said, yes, I have, and I'm going to pass. And he said, tell me why. So I did. And he said, can we meet just one more time and talk?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  And so we did. And um he said, you see, Patrick, the reason why I'm so determined to have you play this character is that you're not gonna have to interpret him. He's already inside you.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I know that. I don't know how he knew it.

• 33:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what do you think he saw that made him say that?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 33:27Rich Roll?

  But he is a psychologist also, right?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  He is, yes. Yes, he is. Ronald Ayer is his name. And yes, he is, um brilliant, brilliant man. And he said, if you do it, I give you my word. I will never leave your side. Not one moment. I will be there, there. And he was too.

• 33:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Boy, it was hard. It was really hard. Um but one thing that came out of it, I'm so grateful for. Um and I looked at it this morning and adjusted it. There is a photo on my desk. Of Winter's Tale, of me as Leontes and my dear beloved friend Bernard Lloyd. We have been talking to him and I've been going crazy in the character. And, and they were taking photo, it was a photo shoot. But they wanted action, they wanted the real play. And in this photograph, he has his hand on my arm and he's leaning towards me.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  And there is so much gentleness in his face, so much empathy and sympathy. That when I was first shown that photograph, I knew it was for all time and it's been on my desk in a frame ever since then. Because that was,

• 35:00Speaker 01

  that became the symbol of what kindness and friendship could mean in a, in a relationship. Because I had not been too good at that in my adult life. And, um, and then Bernie died, uh, actually it's probably two years ago now. And I was with him, um,

• 35:26Speaker 01

  until quite, quite close to his death and he, um, he, he was very stiff and hurting and my wife said, Sonny said, can I, can I just give you a little massage? I think, I think it might help you. And he said, yes, okay, okay. And he stretched out. She massaged him for half an hour and then she hugged him. And then I hugged him and we left and we got to our car.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And we burst into tears.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Both of us. So that picture of him touching my arm with such kindness is part of my daily life.

• 36:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. I mean, I think what I what I extracted or took from that story and your experience of doing Winter's Tale was that you have this director who's also a psychologist who identified something in your psyche that needed to come out that would contribute to the performance and make it great and terrifying. And, you know, I know there are stories of people in the audience who felt like we shouldn't even be watching this. It was so intense.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  But from a psychologist's point of view, it's almost ingenious that he it was a form of therapy for you to connect with that part, to realize that that piece of your dad is inside of you, or there's that unhealed, you know, pain that resides in inside of you from that experience growing up that still required you to, you know, reckon with it and look at it. And perhaps that was a piece in the puzzle that led you towards therapy and kind of making peace with this that has, on some level, you know, healed those wounds.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  That's very true. And it it was something that I could absorb into my work, into my acting and my approach to bringing a role to life. Albee's great play, I think the great American play of the 20th century, I'm sorry, Mr. Miller, he wrote a play called Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

• 37:37Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And I got to play George, the husband. It's a couple, two couples, a husband and wife who are middle aged and a young married couple.

• 37:50Rich Roll?

  With a tinge of alcoholism sprinkled in.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Oh, Lord, yes. So much liquor in that. Yeah, and I had some experience of that, too. But my two broken marriages, I realize, gave me an

• 38:16Speaker 01

  A profound sense of what had been going on inside me during that time when the marriages were breaking up and that I could absorb them into George. I have another photograph that sits on my desk and it's it is, because it's going to be in the book when the photographs are put into the book, it will be there.

• 38:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've just got the galley here, so I don't even have the final one, it's not out yet.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  There's, it's quite a collection of photographs. It will surprise people, which is good. I'm looking forward to that, especially my childhood photographs. But in this one, I'm playing George and it's a scene when Martha, his wife, actually isn't on the stage. It's a scene in the last act of the play and I was, and I was wearing a wig, thinning hair, but some of the hair was dangling over my forehead and my head is down and I look so depressed and fearful.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And I know that that was authentic because I was able to tap into those feelings that I had. When I, when I was getting my first divorce and we were living apart and I went to bed at night and this is the only time this has ever happened for me, I was in so much terror that my legs sweated. Just my legs, nothing else at all. And I've heard that that can happen, but it was an indication of what was inside me. Well, one of the, one of the great joys, including Captain Jean-Luc Picard, is that having to immerse yourself into someone else

• 40:14Speaker 01

  can be so rich in lessons and learning and understanding and.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Getting closer to other people as well.

• 40:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it breeds empathy. You're literally walking a mile in someone else's shoes.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:32Rich Roll?

  And it changes your your view of humanity, I suspect.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  When I was doing Macbeth, I did it for exactly 365 days. The first and the last performance. For a whole year, I played that guy. I lived that guy. And it became not good for me. I mean, for one thing, I began drinking only when the show was over. Too much, way too much. And I, I, his depressions and ferocity and despair towards the end of the play would begin to envelop me more and more as the evening or matinee days, when we'd do it twice,

• 41:14Speaker 01

  wore on and it, it, it became difficult.

• 41:22Rich Roll?

  How do you create healthy boundaries around that so it doesn't seep in? And I guess it sounds like that's been a challenge for you.

• 41:32Rich Roll?

  If you end up, you know, drinking a little bit too much and, you know, walking around brooding on, on this character that you're inhabiting.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  I've learned, and Sunny, my wife, has helped me with this, that when I've finished a day on the set, it doesn't happen that often with filming, but it can do. But certainly when I come home from playing a, a, a stage role,

• 41:59Speaker 01

  I deliberately let it go. Let it go. I mean, this is the gesture that I use. Shake it out. Now I can go home and have some supper and not be in absolute fucking misery.

• 42:13Rich Roll?

  Well, it also

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Because it's what I was.

• 42:14Rich Roll?

  Has to be an insane high to do that every night. And then you're supposed to just go home and go to bed.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:20Rich Roll?

  When your hormones are going crazy because you've just done this endurance event, this artistic endurance event, you know, in real time in front of a live audience who then Sees you and you're you're feeling that, you know, energy of the crowd and then you could just you're supposed to just go to sleep after that like I don't know how that works.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  The last

• 42:41Rich Roll?

  I'm always amazed at Broadway actors who just get up every night or sometimes twice a night and do that for incredibly long stretches.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 42:51Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a limit now on how long I can do a play for, particularly if it's a play that I know is going to be sucking me in.

• 43:01Rich Roll?

  What's interesting is before the podcast, you were sharing about how you just recorded the audiobook for this and you said that was one of, if not the most difficult things that you've done as a performer.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Most, no question, most difficult.

• 43:14Rich Roll?

  Compared to being on Broadway every night or 20 hour days on Star Trek?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I've already told you why I'm being myself.

• 43:24Rich Roll?

  That's really hard.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  I wrote it and I had no intention of reading out loud, recording it when I wrote it.

• 43:32Rich Roll?

  Come on, of course you're gonna read your audiobook.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Believe me, it came as a shock when my agent called.

• 43:39Rich Roll?

  With your voice, you think somebody else is gonna voice you in your autobiography?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  I don't listen to audiobooks. I've never heard an audiobook. I've never recorded one before. I mean, people keep saying, you ought to do it, you know, it can be fun and, you know, it's interesting. No, I never wanted to do it. And so it was in my contract and it was only when I got around to reading the contract in detail that I saw that I was also committing to an audiobook.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  But Simon Schuster and particularly Christina, the producer that I work with on the audiobook has been fantastic. I can only do about two hours. I've once or twice gotten close to three and I've once rapped after an hour because it just destroyed me, wore me out doing it. It's so difficult. I met two actors who said, let's give you a warning. If you've never done an audiobook before, it is the hardest work you'll ever do. And I said, but you're sitting down with a microphone a few inches. I gotta be hard, they said. Well, if you do it, you wait and see.

• 44:45Rich Roll?

  I think people would be aghast if you didn't end up voicing the audiobook to this. It would be, it just would not be right.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Well, I'm doing it every morning, and that's one of the reasons why my voice is a little gravelly. Because I don't know what it is. It's what I'm putting into the morning's work that, and I only ever stop recording when I think it's time for my, my voice to be rested, you know?

• 45:12Rich Roll?

  Well, you sound great. You mentioned, you mentioned friendship a little bit earlier, that photograph that's on your desk,

• 45:21Rich Roll?

  which leads me to my curiosity around your, your friendship with Ian McKellen, which, you know, I think we can all agree, this is, this is friend, friend goals for all of us. Like, it's such a beautiful relationship that you have with this, with this person. It motivated me to go on the internet and, and kind of find pictures of him as a young man, because you describe him as just, there's a mythos around who this person was even when he was young, you know, many decades ago, that, that just portrays him as larger than life. And, and sure enough, I mean, the, the images of him as a young man are just absolutely striking.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 46:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But he was somebody who was very intimidating to everybody, somebody everybody knew was gonna be on the rise. And I think there's this idea that the two of you had been friends from the get-go, but that is not the case.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. We, I first met him at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but we never worked together. Only some years later, we worked once. We did a Tom Stoppard play called Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, EGBDF. And Ian was in it. And I, I, I was very shy of him.

• 46:40Rich Roll?

  What was it about him?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  It was the way he listened when you talked to him. Because Ian is known as a talker himself, but he is a wonderful listener. And I talked to him about things I'd never talked to another man about before.

• 47:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You said, you said that you blame him for turning you into a child again.

• 47:08Rich Roll?

  What does that mean?

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Well, I became silly and adventurous and playful and because he is, you know, he's got a great sense of humor and a great sense of irony particularly. And so EGBDF was one thing and John Wood and Ian McKellen were the two leading actors. I just simply played a psychiatrist. I should be so lucky. And Ian, I don't know how to. I've tried.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  I've sat in front of my computer for a long time, sometimes thinking about Ian and the affection that I have for him and what he gave me when we worked together and when I watched him work on stage. And now in our friendship, it's as close to a love affair as I shall ever have with a man.

• 48:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I don't know if you know this, but if you Google Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, one of the first things that pops up is this question, is Ian McKellen married to Patrick Stewart? But there's actually a really funny story behind that. Do you know what I'm referring to? Yeah. So at one point, yourself, Ian and Hugh Jackman all appear on The Graham Norton Show and Ian announces that he is going to marry you. So there's what he actually meant and there's how that was interpreted.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  That's right. He was the priest at our wedding and he was, he had been qualified and.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  And so far as I know, Sonny and I were only the only couple he married, although he had multiple offers once the word got around that he was.

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  I have no doubt. Yeah, so he ends up marrying you. I guess you were going to get married in Nevada, but there was a pesky state law around his ministry, his sort of legal.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  It was not recognized in Nevada. And so we would go through a mockery of a wedding.

• 49:34Rich Roll?

  So I think, as I understood the story, yeah, you were in Lake Tahoe, you were going to get married on the Nevada side, but he wasn't legally permitted to do that. So you all crossed the border into California and did an impromptu ceremony in a Mexican restaurant.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  In a Mexican restaurant at 11 o'clock at night.

• 49:56Rich Roll?

  And just like a small group of you, right?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, there were five of us.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  So we had witnesses too. And it was extraordinary.

• 50:14Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about Star Trek.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  What?

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  Do you remember that part of your life?

• 50:20Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be a blur, though. Most of it's gotta be one big blur.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. We recorded over.

• 50:29Rich Roll?

  How many seasons? Chris Swan will know.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Seven seasons. We did something like 174 episodes.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  And there are only a handful of them, I remember.

• 50:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  The rest have just all gone into the melting pot. But there are some vivid recollections I do have of certain episodes and certain actors that I worked with and what that meant to me. And the fact that I was getting a break in.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Popular TV.

• 51:03Rich Roll?

  Sure. Yeah, I mean, this was a big deal. You were, you were, I think it was, uh, was it LeVar Burton who put a sign on your door that said something like, beware, uh, unknown British Shakespearean actor inside you. Like, this was your introduction. I mean, you went from being this, you know, just a theater person into the public consciousness very quickly. And the story behind how you got Star Trek, which you go into in detail in the book, is, is super fascinating. I know Ian told you not to do it. He was trying to talk you out of it.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Yep, he did. He was the only one who did.

• 51:41Rich Roll?

  He's apologized for that.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  He is, he has said, he was wrong.

• 51:49Rich Roll?

  I think it's interesting and, and interesting to try to understand what makes Star Trek such a special idea that has left such an indelible kind of mark on our culture and why it continues to persist and be so popular.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  I think the strongest thing is that it is a vision of the future and it is a positive, hopeful vision of the future. Oh, yes, dreadful things happen, have happened in Star Trek. But behind Gene Roddenberry's motivation for creating the, the first series and then coming to work with us was that he wanted to leave behind a sense of positivity and hopefulness and confidence. And it's the one thing that he talked about with me. And,

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Actually, what he said was, we, I, I, I had lunch with him. We only had two meals together, um, because we didn't have actually much in common.

• 53:00Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  He played a lot of golf, and I don't play any golf at all.

• 53:04Rich Roll?

  Well, the first, the first meeting with him didn't go so well, right? He did not want you for the role.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  It was a disaster. Um, and he hadn't invited me. It was my encounter with, well, Ro- Robert Justman had come to UCLA to see a, a public lecture, which an actress and myself were illustrating with extracts from plays, uh, Shakespeare plays. And, uh, he'd seen it and he went back to the office the next morning and he said, um, we found our, uh, captain. And they said, what are you talking about? And they said, um, and, and Gene Rodman said, oh, well, get him in this morning. Let's have a look at him if he's, you think he's that good. And so that, I, I got the phone call at nine o'clock in the morning and I was in Gene's office at 11 o'clock that day and, uh,

• 53:55Speaker 01

  uh, he got out of his chair, there were two other men in the room, including Robert Justman, who was the man who had been to see the play the night before and was blown away by it. Gene stood up and shook my hand and then we talked for

• 54:11Speaker 01

  seven or eight minutes.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  And then Gene said, all right, thank you very much for coming to see us and, uh, it was, thank, thank you.

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  That's that.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Goodbye. And, uh, I left, kind of relieved actually that I was out of this weird atmosphere. But, uh, six months later.

• 54:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  I was gassed.

• 54:33Rich Roll?

  Did you have misgivings about being this highbrow Shakespearean actor and, and dipping your toes into network television at the time?

• 54:43Speaker 01

  I didn't know what I was doing. I'd been in TV.

• 54:48Rich Roll?

  You've done a little stuff, yeah, yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  I mean, some of it, I Claudius, the great BBC series about, based on the two famous novels, I Claudius and Claudius the God. I'd been in that, I'd done a series about a policeman, which only lasted one season. And occasionally, little bits of plays would turn up, but it was not a career for me, and I actually wasn't that interested, really. The theater was what I loved, performance, being on stage night after night after night. And that changed.

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you really came to embrace every aspect of it.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yes, and I love it today, film and television, and I'm worried that I may never get to do it again.

• 55:35Rich Roll?

  I think you're gonna get to do it, do some more.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Really?

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think you got, I think you got a little more in you. I think, when I think about Star Trek, you know, I grew up with the original Star Trek, Captain Kirk, Spock, and all of that, and yes, there is a beautiful optimism to it, perhaps not utopian, but optimistic enough, which I think serves as a contrast to most science fiction. But also, it's always been a show that has been fearless in terms of grappling with social issues, like, that's always been at the core of what the show is about. It gives you an opportunity through allegory to explore things that are going on in culture

• 56:20Rich Roll?

  currently that we're, that we're struggling with.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  I, I have to say, and this will sound unkind to maybe those who hear this, working with Gene Roddenberry was not easy. I mean, he never directed an episode, he was the executive producer.

• 56:40Rich Roll?

  Did every, every big decision had to get run through him?

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 56:43Rich Roll?

  As the creator?

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yes. I was very unconfident, in fact, when I started writing the memoir, I thought, oof.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  People are really gonna wanna hear me go on and on and on about Star Trek and maybe X-Men 2. And I don't think I want to. That's not the most interesting part of my career. I mean, that is a shocking thing to say, because it's assumed, of course, that it is. And I think that throughout that first season, I really didn't know what I was doing. I didn't understand television technique. I'd never had a class in television. In my drama school, we didn't do film and TV work at all, because, you know, nobody was expected to get it, because they were just film actors. And there wasn't that much television either.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  And then I was determined that I would do better. And I knew, even when I first saw it, that I... The best thing that I was doing in the first season was space the final frontier. That I got really good at. And why? Because I copied exactly what Bill has said.

• 58:01Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Bill Shatner.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Bill Shatner, yes, yes.

• 58:04Rich Roll?

  But the thing that's striking is, when you're on the bridge, there is a theatricality to that in a very practical sense. It is a stage. There's entrances and exits.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  And you have your... You're sitting on... You're literally sitting on a throne.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:24Rich Roll?

  So there is a parallel that I imagine, as a stage actor, you were able to connect with and tap into. I mean, it's very Elizabethan.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. And as it became more and more like that, I began to feel more and more comfortable. My first film was, it's in the book, was two afternoons or two mornings work in a film starring Rod Steiger. Rod Steiger was one of my childhood heroes. I'd seen The Pawn Broker. I'd seen...

• 59:07Rich Roll?

  On the Waterfront.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  On the Waterfront, yes. And absolutely loved them. And so, learning that I was...

• 59:17Speaker 01

  This was my first ever day in front of a film camera. He said, what are you doing for lunch? And I said, I don't know. What do you do for lunch on a film set? He said, you go there and you order your lunch and they'll give it to you. Bring it to my trailer.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Rod Steiger is inviting me into his trailer. The man who said, take the job. Take the job.

• 59:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  In the back of that car with Rod and.

• 59:51Rich Roll?

  Brando.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Brando.

• 59:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But the real kicker to that story, though, is it not the fact that you shot that scene? You shot a scene in the back of the car with Rod Steiger for this movie.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Rich Roll?

  I think you had to shoot him. And they were shooting all of his coverage.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Rich Roll?

  And then when they finished that, they said lunch and then he threw a fit.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they said, what they actually said was they did do all of Bill's coverage, some of which I was in. And then they said, OK, that's all we need of you, Bill. You can go to lunch now.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  Right, Rod, you mean.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Rod, Rod, Rod, yeah. And we were sitting side by side in the back of this car. I hadn't actually shot him or killed him. No, I didn't get to do that. He said, what about Patrick?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  And they said, oh, don't worry about that. We'll have somebody read in for you and it'll all be fine. And there was a long silence and I could feel this heat growing on one side of me. And he said, what the fuck do you think I am? I mean, his voice going up and then he went for this assistant stage manager and said, you think I'm gonna leave him now? And he's all done my lines and I'm gonna leave him to do his own? And anyway, it was, it was, and then that's when he said, I'm sorry about it. He apologized to me and I said, no, no, no, no, that was fine. And he invited me to his trailer and he said,

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  the camera photographs thoughts.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  No one had ever said that to me before. I mean, that's the very heart of the method.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Which he was a pupil. I mean, he studied just like Brando did.

• 1:01:51Rich Roll?

  So you carrying that on to the the bridge of the starship Enterprise, that sensibility of the camera can read your thoughts and also a leadership role as the captain, sitting in the throne, remembering that Rod Steiger did what he did for this young actor doing his first movie like that. That's a lesson, right? Like this is how you this is this is, you know, it's not right. Like, and if you're the lead in a project, the tone is being set by how you comport yourself, right? And understanding that you're now carrying that responsibility.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's one of the reasons why I love playing the leading role.

• 1:02:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Because I feel that I can help to give the other actors the best possible experience they could have. And and I will always say there are no number one actors. We're an ensemble. We work together. And I do remember one of the things Rod always said, Rod said to me while on this lunchtime was, whoever is talking, he's the lead. Whoever is. And that was amazing for an actor who only had half a dozen lines.

• 1:03:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he didn't have to. He didn't have to do that.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  No, he didn't. He was being kind and generous and oh, boy.

• 1:03:16Rich Roll?

  And then you ran into him many years later, right?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Years later. And I was in New York. No, I was here in Los Angeles and I was, I think, already working on Star Trek. And I went to this restaurant and we were looking around. It was very busy. There he was, sitting at a table with three other friends. And I said, oh, my God, my God. There's Rod Steiger over there. And she said, go and say hello. Go on. I said, okay, okay. He won't know who the hell I am. It was years ago. So I went over and before I got to the table, he said, Patrick, and stood up. And it was

• 1:03:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  one of the best memories of my career.

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  The gift that keeps giving.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautiful. I need to know about the paranormal activity that was happening in your Silver Lake house that you talk about in the book.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:10Rich Roll?

  Sounds like you were getting visited by ghosts.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I bought a house on Moreno Drive in Silver Lake. One evening, I came home. It was, the floors were staggered down a steep hillside. And so the door from the garage led straight into the master bedroom. And one night, I locked up the car, pulled down the door, opened the bedroom door, and the smell of cooking was intense. And I thought, I must have left the oven on last night. Or why didn't I smell it? So I hurried downstairs. Nothing, just the smell of cooking in the air and nothing else at all. And then it

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  took on from there, footsteps on the stairs, voices in rooms where there was nobody. I came home one day, my son had been staying with me. He went to school here. And I got home and he said, Oh, thank God, you're home. And I said, Why? Is something wrong? He said, Let me show you. And we went into my sitting room where I had a lot of bookshelves. And all the books were thrown across, were scattered across the floor. And I said, What have you been doing? He said, I didn't do anything. I was watching television. And suddenly, all these books were thrown into the bedroom.

• 1:05:34Rich Roll?

  No earthquake?

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Pardon?

• 1:05:36Rich Roll?

  No earthquake.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  No. Um, and there was a place in the hallway. Which I used to go through the house, starting on the, the, the, the ground floor and then work through my house, turning lights off and all that. There was, because my television room was right on the ground floor, on the, the lowest deck of the house. And I, when I got to the middle floor, which was the kitchen, the living room and the dining room and so forth, um, I walked to the foot of the stairs and just before I reached the stairs, I always walked through this icy zone. It was, it just the temperature instantly plummeted and I got to the foot, one foot on the step and it was gone. I let, I rented the house when, when, after, after

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  three years, I moved somewhere else. Um, and I got a, a family moved into it. And they were lovely people. And one day they called me to ask about, I don't know, there was a problem with a washing machine or something that had gone wrong. And, and so we had a little chat. And then just as she was about to hang up, she said, oh, by the way, Patrick, there's, I, there was something I wanted to ask you. You didn't tell us everything that came with your house. They were having it worse than I was. And the child, exactly on this spot where I used to feel the temperature plummet, saw a man standing there. And I

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  found out about him. I, I became very close to it. My neighbors next door, they'd lived there for decades. And they said, yes, yes. Well, that was a man who died in a car accident, actually. Very violent car accident.

• 1:07:22Rich Roll?

  Who had lived in that house?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:27Rich Roll?

  What do you make of all this?

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  Well, that's only one experience that I've had. I've been in other places when I've just had, I mean, Sunny and I were looking for a house in England and we went into one and it was empty. All furniture had been taken out, but it was very, very old. Fifteenth, sixteenth century. And we were going around, there was a long corridor in the upstairs floor and there were doors off all the door, off the corridor into the rooms. And I went into one room and as I got into the middle of the room, I felt hands around my throat. And I cried out, "Help, help!"

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  And Sunny came and ran into the room and got hold of me and dragged me out. I was being strangled in that room.

• 1:08:19Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  So it's, and it's, oh, the first time I saw it, I was 12 years old in a friend's, in a neighbor's house and, and...

• 1:08:28Rich Roll?

  So this is a, this is a recurring thing?

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  I, I, I think I have some kind of openness, some kind of sensitivity that maybe it's history. I don't know, but I feel that I do hear voices occasionally and...

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  And what do you choose to, to interpret from that? What is your sense of...

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  That I'm tuned in to the afterworld.

• 1:09:01Rich Roll?

  Hmm, and that there's no, there's no mistake or irony in you being an actor who plays a character who goes and visits with aliens all over the galaxy?

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there is...

• 1:09:14Rich Roll?

  Come on. And then you turn on the TV and there's congressional hearings on UFOs and UAPs. Like, there's a convergence happening right now. What is going on, Patrick?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  There is. It's extraordinary. And things being seen more and more. In the sky. I just hope that whatever happens, happens while I'm still here.

• 1:09:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I gotta let you go shortly here, but there's two more things I want to touch on quickly. The first thing is, is, is you're a bit of an animal welfare advocate. There's a couple squirrels that appear and reappear in this book. You have an incident at a bullfighting match that seems like it was impactful. And I know you do a lot of work with dogs, particularly pit bulls. So where does that sense for animal well-being come from?

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  I had a dog when my father bought me a dog, not long after he came out of the war. The dog's name was Rover and he was a thoroughbred Scottish collie. A Scottish sheepdog. He was black and white, very classical dog. And I loved this guy. He was wonderful. And we had him a long, long time and then he had to be taken and put down. He was very ill. But I never forgot that. And when I was, I made contact by this Wags and Walks in Los Angeles.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  It opened all that up again. And so we began fostering dogs, Sonny and myself. And it was wonderful.

• 1:11:00Rich Roll?

  How many dogs do you have?

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  I think in total, we fostered seven, only one at a time, never more than that. But, and we only, I mean, the shortest we had, one of them was two days. And the very first one we had was an extraordinary dog. Beautiful, sensitive. It would look you right straight into the eyes and cock its head on one side. And I could feel him trying to connect with me, you know? And it's, it's, so I do what I can to, to help the ones who need help and, you know?

• 1:11:43Rich Roll?

  You've lived just an absolutely extraordinary life. And you did a wonderful job with the book. It's wildly entertaining. It's a very difficult book to put down. The stories are just absolutely legendary. So, well done in that regard. I love it. And I know you're about to embark on quite the book tour. So, you're gonna be doing a lot of media stuff. I guess, you know, I'm curious about what it is that you want people to take from the book, but also just your life. Like, what is instructive about the experiences that you've had and the lessons that you've learned as you reflect back as an 83-year-old man on what's important, what's not?

• 1:12:23Rich Roll?

  And maybe even a guiding principle or two that we could incorporate into our own lives?

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Well, they come down to things that I am still working on. And it's awkward being a leading actor on television and film. But being brave, being open, being sensitive to other people, tuning into them, becomes more and more and more important to me. And I find that in the close friends that I have, that is their relationship with me too. And it's a wonderful, wonderful experience. I wish I could go back.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  There are things I would like to say to my parents and my brothers, both of them, that I never said. And that makes me very, very sad that I never told them.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  What they gave me.

• 1:13:36Rich Roll?

  But this gives you an opportunity to at least say it publicly.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  It kinda does, yes. I mean, my first draft of this book was over 700 pages. And it's now about 440. People are saying, so what are you gonna write next? And I say, no, no, no, no, no, there's no next. This is it. And then the other day, I thought, hmm, well, maybe I could find that draft that's got 350 words in it that are all in my book.

• 1:14:12Rich Roll?

  The director's cut.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  The director's cut, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:16Rich Roll?

  To your point, that was beautifully shared, thank you. There's a section in the book that I found quite moving, which was about your relationship with vulnerability as an actor and how that's a tool and a vehicle for unlocking truth, but also as a way of being in the world, right? The power that comes with allowing yourself to be vulnerable onstage, but also with the people that you care about.

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. That's perhaps the primary objective in my life now.

• 1:14:57Rich Roll?

  To be vulnerable with those you care about.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 1:15:04Rich Roll?

  I think that's a beautiful place to end it. Thank you. You're an international gift to humanity. I just wanted to recognize you for the work that you do, of course, and this beautiful book that you're putting out into the world. I wish you much success with it. But really, how you comport yourself as a man in the world. Like, I find it to be extremely aspirational and the way that you are so open-hearted and earnest with your feelings and your friendships, I think is a guidepost for someone like myself. So, thank you for that. And I loved having the opportunity to meet you and talk to you.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Thank you. I've messed up at times.

• 1:15:51Rich Roll?

  We all have.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  And I hold on to them. I don't let them go. I don't let them control me, of course, but they're there.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  And that was part of who I have been. And in a little tiny way, still is. And so that helps me to reinforce the close relationships that I already have. They're so important.

• 1:16:20Rich Roll?

  I hope that you can find a little bit more grace and forgiveness for yourself. I think you owe that to yourself.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:16:29Rich Roll?

  You're welcome.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for that last comment.

• 1:16:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  And with that, I think I have to say au revoir.

• 1:16:39Rich Roll?

  Thank you, sir.

• 1:16:44Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment.

• 1:17:28Rich Roll?

  Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by David Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Salis.

• 1:18:12Rich Roll?

  Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, see you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  Subtitles by the Amara.org community