Patrick Stewart Was Asked To Wear A Wig At His ‘Star Trek’ Audition — A Wig That Flew By Itself From Heathrow To LAX

Patrick Stewart‘s Captain Jean-Luc Picard almost had a full head of hair!

In his new memoir Making It So, Stewart revealed the surprising fact while recalling a time when he was en route from London to his audition in Los Angeles for Star Trek: The Next Generation. As he was about to head to L.A., his agent was trying to reach him at home.

“Right as I was boarding my plane at Heathrow, my London agent called [Stewart’s ex-wife] Sheila [Falconer] at home and notified her that the Paramount people had been in touch, asking if I owned a hairpiece, and if I did, could I bring it to the audition?” he wrote, per Entertainment Weekly.

Stewart — who is iconically bald — explained that “Sheila diligently retrieved [his] ‘audition wig’ its space in my wardrobe and boxed it up,” and with the help of a British Airways attendant, the high-class hairpiece jetted off to LAX.

“I do not know if my hairpiece flew first class. But by Sunday, it had arrived, and I drove back to LAX to retrieve it,” he continued. “It was packed in my briefcase when I drove to the Paramount Studios lot on Monday morning.”

He donned the wig for his audition, which only consisted of one scene, and eventually three Paramount executives met him at his dressing room.

“Shit, here comes the bad news,” he remembered thinking when they arrived.

However, it was quite the opposite.

“But all they did was thank me once more, wish me a good day, and take off,” he shared. “When the door closed, Joy began jumping up and down gleefully. ‘You know why they did that?’ she said. ‘They wanted to see what you looked like without the hairpiece. And I think they liked what they saw!'”

Stewart (and his bald head) became an icon over the course of his seven seasons on the Paramount sci-fi series. However, his friend and X-Men co-star Ian McKellen attempted to talk him out of auditioning in the first place, as Stewart wrote that McKellen “almost bodily prevented [him] from doing so,” per EW.

Stewart recalled him saying, “‘No, you must not do that. You must not. You have too much important theater work to do. You can’t throw that away to do TV. You can’t. No!’”

While he admitted that “there are few people, particularly with regard to acting, whose counsel [he] trust[s] more than Ian’s,” he told McKellen that ” theater would return to [his] life whenever [he] was ready for it, whereas an offer of the lead role in an American TV series might never come again.”

Despite the lack of hair, that didn’t stop him from wigging out on set.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is streaming on Paramount+. Making It So: A Memoir is out now.