Sir Patrick Stewart, one of our most prominent and beloved hairless actors, sent his career into warp speed as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His smooth cranium was a distinct subversion of the classic Star Trek look, trading the full head of brown locks atop William Shatner for Stewart’s shimmering lack of follicles. But, get this: Paramount originally wanted a more Shattner-esque captain aboard the USS Enterprise. In his new memoir, Making It So, Stewart reveals that as he boarded the plane for his audition, his agent reached Stewart’s wife, Sheila, at home, asking if he owned and could bring a hairpiece to the audition. She made it so.
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“Sheila diligently retrieved my ‘audition wig’ from its space in my wardrobe and boxed it up, whereupon a British Airways representative collected it and placed it on a later flight to Los Angeles,” Stewart writes.
Though Stewart doesn’t know if his “hairpiece flew first class,” it arrived days later, and he drove to LAX to pick it up. “It was packed in my briefcase when I drove to the Paramount Studios lot on Monday morning.”
The audition, by Stewart’s account, went poorly. He only performed a single scene. “Shit, here comes the bad news,” Stewart thought when three executives came by later to thank the actor in his dressing room. They thanked him for his time and left. However, when the door closed, his hairstylist Joy told him, “’You know why they did that? They wanted to see what you looked like without the hairpiece. And I think they liked what they saw!’”
Unfortunately, we don’t have any photographic evidence of his hairy audition. In 2018, a picture of Picard with hair went viral and was mistakenly credited to the tryout. However, the photo comes from a flashback in the Next Generation episode, “Violations,” which, as some Redditors pointed out, made him look like Dr. Smith from Lost In Space.