Patrick Stewart Played Othello as the Only White Actor in the Cast

In November 1997, Patrick Stewart, the actor millions knew as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, walked onto a stage in Washington, D.C., to play Othello, Shakespeare's Moorish general. He was the only white actor in the cast. Every other role, from Desdemona to the scheming Iago, went to Black actors, in a staging that became known as the "photonegative" Othello.

The production at the Shakespeare Theatre Company was directed by Jude Kelly, then artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in England. Patrice Johnson played Desdemona, Ron Canada played Iago and Franchelle Stewart Dorn played Emilia. It ran from November 1997 into January 1998, and a performance on 13 December 1997 was recorded on video, according to the Learning on Screen archive of Shakespeare recordings.

The concept came from Stewart himself. He told Playbill that he had been imagining himself as Othello since he was about 14. But by the time he was old and experienced enough for the part, it had stopped being acceptable for a white actor to put on blackface and pretend to be African. Rather than give up the role, he reversed the play: a white outsider inside a Black society. He hoped the switch would "encourage a much broader view of the fundamentals of racism."

The idea only makes sense against the long history of the part. For generations, Othello was usually played by white actors in dark makeup. The New York Times review of the Washington staging quoted an 1827 theatre makeup book that instructed: "A tawny tinge is now the color used for the gallant Moor." Stewart and Kelly simply removed the makeup and let the casting do the talking.

Black actors had to fight for the role. In April 1833, the New York-born actor Ira Aldridge replaced the dying Edmund Kean as Othello at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. It was the first time a Black actor played the part on a West End stage, as English Heritage notes. The audience applauded, but hostile critics turned on him, and he played Othello only twice before the run was cancelled, according to the Folger Shakespeare Library. He later found fame touring continental Europe.

In the United States, the breakthrough came in October 1943, when Paul Robeson starred in the Theatre Guild's Othello on Broadway, with Uta Hagen as Desdemona and José Ferrer as Iago. It ran for 296 performances, still the record for any Shakespeare play on Broadway, according to Harvard Library and Guinness World Records.

Stewart's version flipped the usual question. Instead of asking how a white actor could pass as Othello, it asked the audience to watch a man who is the only person of his color in every room. The Times critic wrote that the company sought to shatter stereotypes and to show the endlessly adaptive nature of Shakespeare's exploration of otherness. Not everyone was convinced: the scholar Denise Albanese argued that the casting treated race as something performed, and so downplayed its importance.

Stewart died on 28 October 2026 at his home in Los Angeles, aged 86, as AP reported. Most tributes remembered Picard and Professor X, yet the Othello he had dreamed of since his teens remains one of the boldest experiments of a stage career that began long before Star Trek.

Sources: Shakespeare Theatre Company; Learning on Screen; Playbill (1997); The New York Times (1997); English Heritage; Folger Shakespeare Library; Harvard Library; Guinness World Records; AP (2026). Cover: Patrick Stewart at San Diego Comic-Con 2019, by Gage Skidmore.jpg).