8 Great Actors Whose Bad Experiences Caused Them To Quit Hollywood

2. Turning Back The Clock On Typecasting - Patrick Stewart

A few of us were already aware of Patrick Stewart long before he became a household name - we'd seen him in small roles in John Boorman's Excalibur and David Lynch's regrettable adaptation of Dune. For those who hadn't his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and later as Professor Xavier in the X-Men movies soon changed that. An actor who began life in the theatre and always felt more comfortable on the stage, it was Stewart's experiences working on X-Men: The Last Stand which changed his relationship with the movies. Already feeling as if returning to the stage was becoming more difficult on account of being typecast as Picard, he felt increasingly stereotyped as the "grand, deep-voiced, bald English guy" in the role of Xavier. A change in director early in production, after he'd signed on to work with Bryan Singer who was then replaced with Brett Ratner, no doubt exacerbated his feelings about the differences between movies and the theatre, and Stewart's output following X-Men: The Last Stand consisted almost entirely of voice over work for animation and narration for documentaries when he wasn't on the stage. Thankfully he returned to the franchise in recent years, reuniting with Singer on X-Men: Days of Future Past this year.