[AS:]The film I am about to shoot in Israel with Julian Schnabel is about a very simple man who doesn’t want to fight. He’s a husband and a father.
———-
JM: Beyond that, you have no idea what he is?
———-
AS: No. Most women actors over history have never known what they do—just the housewife or the girlfriend. I’m just the man in this scenario. Which means that I’ll probably make him something like a gardener—something I understand.
JM: So what happened after Star Trek? You left LA not long after, right?
AS: Los Angeles felt like the wrong place to be, so I took my family and we went up to New York. The town seemed dark and dismal and boring. Lonely. But it wasn’t, that was just my life. And I couldn’t find any work. I did a couple of films right away. Vertical Limit and Reign of Fire. In Vertical Limit I had six lines. I spent six months in New Zealand to deliver those lines. I was playing a kind of Afghani or Pakistani Sherpa dude, a mountain guide. It was fun. It kept me going financially. No one was sending me scripts. No one wanted to know, really. I was flailing. My marriage was falling to pieces. In my imagination, we were in New York for a ridiculously large amount of time. It was a year. And then they blew up the World Trade Center.JM: You were there?
AS: My wife and son were. I had gone back to England on September 10. I was going to direct a film. The very next day, they blew the building up. And that was the beginning of a new chapter of my life, the beginning of becoming Arab, becoming politicized. I think that happened to the whole swath of people who have Arabic or Islam in their culture. Everybody had to change their tune on that day.
JM: Thinking about your connection to the Mahdi, I notice that Deep Space Nine has a strong spiritual angle to it, all about prophecies and oracles.
——–
AS: It’s a soap opera, for mass consumption. For two million dollars an episode, they’ve got to deliver mass-market product. The religious aspect was really a thinly-veiled nod toward Palestine. It was all about terrorism, which was quite prophetic. I was about as apolitical as you could be at that point. I barely read a book in a year. I watched loads of movies. I played loads of computer games. I wasn’t hedonistic. I didn’t get massively drunk. I didn’t take many drugs.
SFO: Originally billed as Siddig El Fadil, the actor known as Julian Bashir changed his name to Alexander Siddig during the show’s run. Didn’t he try to change it again?
AR: He really wanted to change his name every season. It drove the producers crazy. They let him do it once, and that was all. We always called him Sid, though, no matter what the credits said.
Regarding his [angry] reaction to [Bashir’s genetic enhancement storyline]:
Jordan Hoffman: What did the other cast members think? Were they on your side or did they think you were being crazy?
Alexander Siddig: I had a reputation for being a bit of a crank, yeah. They thought I was being cranky. I had this – there was one time I got furious because none of us were being paid royalties on our - this is rubbish, not important for the real world - but, nevertheless, we weren’t being paid royalties on our photographs. So I changed my name for a number of reasons, but that was one of them. So that they would have to re-do all the photographs, all the press with all the right name on it.
And I didn’t turn up to the big photo call for the season’s photo. So there’s one season’s photo of Deep Space Nine – the cast, without me in it which is the one I didn’t turn up to. And being a naïve twenty-something year-old, I didn’t realize that they immediately turned around and fired the head of marketing. So there was a real significant impact for me being such a childish brat.
chequerootlurks
