Patrick Stewart reflects on Star Trek: Picard's finale, from his biggest regret to why his voice sounded hoarse

The Hollywood Reporter

"My only regret is that once Jean-Luc revealed those hidden facts about his childhood to us, I almost wished we could immediately put him back on the bridge of the Enterprise to hear and see what the impact this revelation had on him," Stewart tells The Hollywood Reporter. "But we couldn’t do that. There are so many emotional complexities in this whole series that we did not investigate much in Next Generation. I grew up in a violent home and over the years, thanks to lots of very expensive American therapy, it’s something that I think I’ve come to terms with. But the harm that it could do while it was being compressed and kept out and kept back and not acknowledged, it was very dark. I realized this was the same with Jean-Luc. Now, if you watched episodes nine and 10, you will hear that my voice sounds different. Whenever smoke is used onstage, I have to make a protest because — I know it’s not poisonous, it’s not going to harm — it gets onto the vocal cords. I particularly suffer badly from this. And it made me a little hoarse. So, at first, we were going to rerecord a lot of what I said, but I urged (executive producer) Akiva (Goldsman) and my fellow producers not to do that because the weakness in my voice was reflecting the weakness in the character." ALSO: Stewart says the cameo in Picard's finale "was marvelous."