Alexander Siddig Answers Fan Questions: 2018 Edition

Sidsters, we have a treat to close out 2018! Throughout the year we’ve solicited fan questions via Facebook and Twitter. Those questions were collected, sometimes combined, occasionally edited for clarity, and submitted to Alexander Siddig for a special year-end interview conducted by you! Enjoy, and here’s to a spectacular 2019!

Q: I’ve noticed in several pictures that you often wear a pinky ring. Is there a special significance to it?

Sid: First, I just had to look up ‘pinky finger’ to try and figure out where that ring might go – I’ve always heard the phrase but never been curious enough (until now) to find out the answer. Fifty-three years old and someone has nudged me to learn something new. Many thanks.

Frustratingly, I have no idea when I wore a ring there except on film a couple of times – I wear a wedding ring when I’m not working which I have to remove when I am working in case I forget to take it off or simply lose it.

Q: Is there a moment in your life that you would choose to relive any time you wanted to? If so, what?

Sid: I love this question because I’ve never heard it before. When I was 9 or 10 I won a silver racing bike with ten gears in a raffle at school. I had never won anything up until that point and I don’t think I’ve won anything significant since so it remains my greatest stroke of luck but as time goes by, I feel that I have forgotten just how proud I was and how special I felt that day. A giddy overwhelming sense of acute pleasure that I would definitely need some kind of chemical catalyst to re-feel these days. I’d love to relive that 9-year-old’s triumph.

Q: Who/What is your favourite author/book/genre, and what do you like about them/it?

Sid: I absolutely loved Orson Scott Card’s Ender series*. It’s been a while since I read it – I was totally blown away by the first two books especially and found the 3rd a little hard to comprehend. I’m looking forward to re-reading the whole thing again one of these days to see if my older head has a different insight.

I tried Isaac Asimov when I was young, Sagan when I was a little older but nothing came as close to grabbing me by the scruff of my imagination and carried me off to distant galaxies as did that series except perhaps Douglas Adams. The movie was catastrophically disappointing …

And then there is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials* – a work of such exquisite genius and innovative language that every page holds a gem. When God arrives in his carriage is still the most elegant indictment of mass religion that anyone has penned to my knowledge in one short line.

Q: What is your “desert island” book (i.e. book you would take if you were stuck in the middle of nowhere)?

Sid: Do I get the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible like they do on the radio show of the same name? I think I’d have to ask for a fiendishly complicated textbook of some sort so that I could keep my brain ticking over – brain surgery perhaps or theoretical physics, I wonder? Maybe the latter if I ever decided to try and leave my desert island.

Q: Do you like to cook? If so, what’s your specialty?

Sid: I absolutely adore cooking for other people. If left to feed myself, I’d never bother. I’m a complete control freak in the kitchen so I prefer doing everything myself – paring, chopping, peeling and even washing up is therapeutic for me. I can happily spend three or four hours putting together whatever dish takes my fancy but I don’t think I have a specialty although people often ask for my Foules Mesdammes or my roast potatoes or my fish pie (which is really Jamie Oliver’s fish pie made with cheddar cheese instead of flour – try it, it’s amazing).

Last Christmas I made a roast goose supplemented with a small turkey (a goose will only feed about 5 hungry people) – then I used the leftover meats to make a goose and turkey terrine with cranberries. Gooseflesh is nearly black around the legs and the turkey is white as snow which resulted in a really pretty slice (sorry vegetarians – you’ll have to make do with the Foules).

This Christmas I made a beef rib roast in the ‘Sous Vide’ with roasted potatoes, baked Brussels sprouts, glazed carrots and fresh horseradish. I also cured a side of Faroe salmon which we drizzled with dill mustard sauce on pumpernickel for all those pesky family meet and greets.

Q: What type of music do you like? Do you play an instrument?

Sid: I love all kinds of music but I would categorize myself as more of a Beatles fan than a Rolling Stones fan in general if that gives you an insight. I love Indie music of pretty much any stripe – I’m a big Radiohead fan – particularly “OK Computer”. I really enjoy The Foo Fighters too and the first few Muse albums but my greatest and first love is late romantic European music, think Mahler, Wagner, Wolf, Bruchner, Sibelius et al.

I sadly don’t play any instrument – I experimented with piano when I was 8 and violin when I was 9, I played violin for our school Morris dancing group (yup! Morris dancing) which was fine because squeaky discordant dying sounds worked very well in the pubs where all the adults were already pretty tipsy anyway. If I could play an instrument I’d choose the piano but my favorite instrument to listen to is the cello (try listening to Jaqueline Du Pre play Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Barbirolli conducting a few times and you’ll see what I mean).

Q: Apart from acting, what other hobbies or interests do you have?

Sid: I love to cook and make stuff with my hands – woodwork or gardening.

We moved to Massachusetts this year and have to rent while we find our feet so maybe I’ll go back to drawing and stuff when I get a chance. Anything crafty is fun for me.

I love playing computer games too – currently, I’m playing Elite Dangerous: Horizons.

Q: If you could be an animal, what would you be and why?

Sid: I think of myself as a leopard, 🐆 but other people see me as more of a camel. 🐫 Hmmm, I wonder what that says about my inflated opinion of myself?

Q: What is your fondest memory from DS9/playing Bashir?

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 7 cast portrait

Sid: Walking in those gates at Paramount studio so many days for 7 years was a kind of fairy tale life for a young actor. Walking in Cecile B De Milles’ footsteps, passing Lucille Ball’s little cottage that she had built just like the one at home so her children felt comfortable while they were with her at work.

I was so lucky to work with wonderful, nurturing talents like Andy Robinson and Armin Shimmerman – I even married one of the cast members and our child, Django, is now 22!

Q: It seems like actors often have to pick up new skills for roles, at least enough to look convincing on screen. What are some skills you’ve learned for your acting career? Do/Can you still use them?

Sid: I really don’t think I’d still be able to ride if I didn’t have to ride horses as often as I do. I learned how to ride at prep school when I was a kid but we were on these pudgy, flatulent ponies which plodded around an indoor oval-shaped hall with sand on the floor for an hour every week and that doesn’t really count. When we’re on the set of a movie, we’re given these amazingly well-trained horses which respond to your slightest twitch and rear up, gallop and stop on a dime when properly instructed to. Thank God I don’t have enough money to own horses…

Q: What is the most fun you have had in a role?

Sid: Fun might not be the right word here but my first acting job ever in a TV mini-series called Big Battalions (1992) took me to Mecca in Saudi Arabia and Jerusalem in the same month. Mecca was terrifying back then (it’s been done up since). I had to shave every conceivable hair on my body (except my head weirdly) because we were going to do “Umra” which is basically the mini version of Haj. Two of us, Raad Rawi and I, were acting and we had three nominal crew to shoot this ‘documentary’ (we had to lie about that bit). Cameras in the great mosque are kind of a no-no – someone had been stoned just for taking a snapshot only weeks previously and we had quite a big one, with a 200mm lens, sitting on the roof.

Screencaps & descriptions of Big Battalions from an old fan club newsletter.

Raad and I would basically walk in a big circle with the thousands of people who were gathered to pray while a crew member would walk past us and whisper, “action,” whereupon we’d stop reciting the prayers we’d learned and start our dialogue. It would have been a hair-raising experience had I not already shaved most of mine off. Needless to say, our ‘man’ from the Saudi Ministry of Culture was arrested and disappeared about two days into our shoot.

Jerusalem was supposed to be a lot easier but films were shot pretty fast and loose in the early ’90s. For example, nobody thought to tell the throng of tourists that we’d be shooting live rounds into the air during a riot scene. In fact, nobody thought to tell the tourists that we were shooting a riot scene… You knew exactly who the tourists were because they were the ones screaming in terror.

There were many crazy incidents in Jerusalem – apart from me sitting astride the Wailing Wall for a particular scene looking down on those at prayer (again not told that this young Palestinian looking dude would be sitting on their most holy monument seemingly chatting away to himself) – but after a morning of hard ‘intifada’, myself and some extras took a break on some plastic chairs in the square to have a water and coffee. A very jolly group of Americans were wandering around wearing bright orange t-shirts which read “I’m cleaning up Jerusalem” on the front. One particular woman stopped at our little table – with me were sitting a few extras, one was a rabbi (if I remember correctly), there must have been at least two IDF soldiers and rest of us were just common or garden Palestinian troublemakers – the woman’s husband came up to look as well and she definitely said, “Look! They all seem to get along so well now.”

Q: What has been your most challenging role so far?

Sid: Although I could have been seriously hurt or arrested or worse during Big Battalions, I can easily say that my most challenging role so far was the one I just finished. It’s a part in the very excellent series Deep State and there are some scenes in which I have to speak three different languages, none of them my own. Tamashek, Arabic and French. And if anybody says, “Well that’s not a perfect Tamashek accent…”, I’ll, I’ll scream at them through the TV.

Q: Is there a role you would jump at the chance to play?

Sid: This is a question to which I have a stock answer, Leontes in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, but the truth is that I am constrained by my ethnicity to some degree and my sex. I am a product of the English education system and my knowledge of the people in history and in literature has been moulded by it. I could say that I’d like to play Othello for example but I may just not be dark enough – or Napoleon perhaps but I might just be too dark. So I think I’d like to answer accurately by saying that the role that I ‘would jump at’ hasn’t yet been written.

Q: Is there a place in the world where you’d love to film a project but you haven’t had the opportunity yet?

Sid: Japan. Acting is how I get around, especially if it’s a long haul flight, and I’ve never been able to afford to go to Japan. For that long in the air, there is no way I’d fly economy – my legs are so long that the folding table rests on them when it’s down meaning I have to eat everything on an angle.

I’m curious about Japan. I’ve read all sorts of historical stuff about the place.

Q: If you had all the money in the world and were able to make any film you wanted, what would it be about?

Sid: My multiple great grandfather was called The Mahdi by his followers in Sudan at the end of 19th Century. He reputedly had General Gordon (British army) murdered after defeating him in a famous battle called The Battle of Omdurman (where I was born), which so upset the British back home that they sent a huge expeditionary force under General Kitchener to settle the score.

Hollywood made a movie about it in the ’70s (I think) starring Charles Heston as Gordon and Lawrence Olivier as my ancestor (now there’s an actor who didn’t allow his ethnicity get in the way of a good part). I wouldn’t mind having a stab at giving that story a more accurate fly by – but I’d need all the money in the world and you selfish people everywhere are simply not going to hand over all the money in the world.

Q: Have you ever considered teaching a Master Class in acting?

Sid: Teaching is a very specific skill that requires more patience than I possess and more planning than I can execute with any reliability. And there’s the little prerequisite that I’d need to be a Master. Ahem.

Q: What would you be doing if you weren’t in showbiz?

Sid: Having done almost nothing else but act all my grown-upness I’ve never really wondered, “what if?”. Perhaps a lawyer? I like to scheme and lie and manipulate, I could easily pay off prostitutes on my client’s behalf for a living. What could be hard about that?

Seriously I am fascinated by law and the fact that it can be used to hurt or to help is a moral complexity that intrigues me.

Q: Looking back, what advice would you give to the 20-year old version of yourself?

Sid: Please don’t give away all your money. You might need it one day.

Q: We were told “Don’t LICK Siddig” at Destination Star Trek. Does that mean someone actually did that once so now it needs to be said? (Mel: OMG! 😂)

Sid: I vaguely remember that. What were they all smoking back then?

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