Alexander Siddig: I’ve Been Blessed
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Deep Space Nine‘s Alexander Siddig has had a varied career after his work on the show, and the actor is grateful for his career.
“I’ve been doing a really versatile set of roles, from really wildly different things, but different audiences,” he explained. “I’ve spread myself so thin, but there’s not really one demographic that hasn’t seen, or been in the position, to see something that I’ve done, for which I’m really proud and feeling really lucky. I feel really blessed.”
The character of Bashir was “really unpopular at the beginning because audiences just didn’t know what to make of him,” said Siddig. “This was not a kid who was beautiful and knew it, and strutted his stuff, and picked up all the girls. He just wasn’t that guy, but that was the fashion. So we had a few difficult years at the beginning.”
Siddig is also grateful to Rick Berman, who defended the character and kept him from being axed. “I remember Rick (Berman), bless his cotton socks, would defend me to the studio for the first two seasons because they were desperate to fire me. And he said, ‘No, over my dead body. I picked this guy; I’m going to stick with this guy.’ And over time, people changed their minds about Bashir.”
If Siddig could play Bashir one more time, what would he want to explore? “I still love the difficult question, the question of ‘At which point does the means stop justifying the ends?’ That’s what I’d want to explore,” he said.
Although he doesn’t go to many conventions, Siddig enjoys the ones that he attends. “I will go to conventions because…I really like the fans, I really enjoy hanging out,” he said. “There are a few fans that I have seen for years and years and years, and I am very comfortable amongst them. I mean, who wouldn’t be?…They genuinely are warm.”
Siddig will be attending Destination Star Trek Europe next month, to be held Oct 7-9 at the NEC Birmingham.
The full interview, in which Siddig talks about other projects as well as his days on Deep Space Nine, can be found at StarTrek.com.
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