Apparently, every so often, someone googles "Patrick Stewart with hair" and ends up with a black and white photo of a very attractive young man giving a steely stare to the camera. The only problem is that it's not Patrick Stewart with hair. It's the late Andy Whitfield, best known for playing the lead role on the Starz series Spartacus: Blood and Sand.
Now, the photo is going viral once again because comedic actress Natalie Morales—who's regularly appeared on Netflix's Dead to Me and NBC's Parks and Recreation—recently googled "Patrick Stewart with hair." Understandably, she was too tempted not to share the jaw-dropping photo.
And clearly, she's not alone.
Some internet sleuthing suggests that the culprit for this deceit may be a five-year-old Reddit thread that mistakenly labels the Whitfield photo as "Young Patrick Stewart...with hair."
After getting schooled, Morales clarified.
But the good news is that photos of Patrick Stewart with hair do exist, and they are fine.
Here is Patrick Stewart with hair in the 1976 BBC miniseries I, Claudius.
And here is Patrick Stewart with hair in the 1975 miniseries North and South.
But there's a twist: In both of those photos, Stewart is wearing wigs.
In 2007, the actor did an interview on BBC's Parkinson and said that he lost all of his hair within the span of a year when he was 19. And at first, he was devastated.
"I thought everything was over," he said. Stewart used to wear hats all the time to hide his balding head, until a classmate and friend named George, who was also a Judo black belt, helped Stewart face his fears:
[George and his wife] got up at the end of the lunch and I thought they were going to make a coffee or something. And all of a sudden I was grabbed from behind by George, this big powerful man, and I thought he was playing some kind of game, so I was laughing and joking. And then his wife appeared in front of me with a pair of scissors and I knew in an instant what she was going to do, and I began to scream and shout, and now it was serious. I was fighting. I mean, I was fighting to keep my appearance. And she lifted [my hair] up and she cut it all off.And then George, still holding me, he came around and he knelt down in front of me and said, 'Now you be yourself. No more hiding!'
And he was right ... It was not only inhibiting as a person, it was hopeless if you're an actor, of course.
After that, he embraced his baldness, and eventually, so did the rest of the world. Stewart said that a reporter once asked Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original Star Trek television series, whether or not it made sense for Stewart's character, Jean-Luc Picard, to be bald because, surely, they would have cured male pattern baldness by the 24th century.
Roddenberry's response? "No, by the 24th century, no one will care." Well, except for some curious people on Google, of course.
