Patrick Stewart’s wife Sunny Ozell found it “distressing” to see him play a neo-Nazi.
The British thespian is one of the most beloved names in cinema, but his turn as Darcy in Green Room sees him take on a completely new role. Watching a screening with Sunny, Patrick admits it was hard for his spouse to take in.
“I first saw it with my agent and my wife,” he told Britain’s Metro newspaper.
“My wife doesn’t like to know too much about projects that I’m doing, she likes to be surprised. During the screening, she left the room twice and came back, saying: ‘I can’t handle it’. She found it too upsetting, distressing.”
To get into character, 75-year-old Patrick took his research online to see what he could unearth about the fascist group. It wasn’t hard to find what he was looking for, though Patrick was still surprised by the group’s extremist views.
“I just Googled ‘white supremacists in America’. I looked at the insanity of it all, the delusion, the craziness, the lies, the wanting to turn the clock back to some other time when fascism was the only solution,” he sighed.
Patrick fans shouldn’t be too dismayed at the racist role though, as he’ll soon be returning to more familiar ground as X-Men’s Charles Xavier in 2017’s Wolverine flick.
It will be the last outing for Wolverine actor Hugh Jackman, but sees Narcos actor Boyd Holbrook join the franchise for the first time.
It was on the set of 2000 movie X-Men that Patrick formed a friendship with fellow English legend Ian McKellen. Their bond is so strong, Ian even acted as the minister at Patrick and Sunny’s 2013 nuptials.
“I’d been a huge fan for years, In the X-Men films, he was so clever and brilliant and gorgeous and confident, all the things I wasn’t,” Patrick smiled. “We had adjoining trailers, so we would hang out and found we had a lot in common.”
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