Our Man Bashir

April 25, 2024 1:34 PM

“ So my editor, and I, would like me to bring Garak into this.” - “ That’s interesting. There is an interesting angle for that.” - Star Trek’s Alexander Siddig interviewed for Arab-American Heritage Month
posted by Artw (25 comments total)

That was a great read. It went a lot of places I wasn't expecting it to go and was full of a lot of insight. Thank you for posting, I'm glad to have read it.

Garak memes are popular in the corner of the Mastodon world I live in, and they are usually quite queer coded.
posted by hippybear at 1:47 PM on April 25 [2 favorites]

One of the things that Star Trek has consistently worked toward is representation, and especially racial representation. It started with Uhura and Chekov on the bridge,

Uh, Sulu?
posted by MarcWolfe at 2:34 PM on April 25 [6 favorites]

is it too late to change my username to “a bottle of implied homosexuality”
posted by cabbage raccoon at 2:37 PM on April 25 [10 favorites]

nice. just watched the DS9 episode were they're all working for a newspaper. love that episode it brings out their true acting and reminds me of the old Nero Wolflf cast and how they performed well together.
posted by clavdivs at 2:43 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

It's rewarding to see Siddig talk explicitly about the homoeroticism with Garak and how they thought about it. Or didn't much, at the time. Andrew Robinson has also spoken about it from his end.

If somehow you've never seen it, this two minute clip of Bashir and Garak's first meeting is a lovely bit of enhancement editing by Twitter user Julie @wellsbering. Siddig talks about this scene (but not the edit) in the interview.

I genuinely never thought of Bashir as Arab, a from of blindness on my part. I appreciated Siddig pointing out that pre-9/11 that wasn't nearly as complicated. Hilarious but awful how he says "I would probably have been cast as Major Kira".
posted by Nelson at 2:47 PM on April 25 [29 favorites]

Until that two minute clip, I had never realized (having watched all of DS9 in my past) that Garak was gay-coded, and that romance might-could exist between them. I wasn't on Tumblr but I saw that clip last year and Garashir makes so much more sense now. I recommend it as a lovely companion to the article — both because it's swell, and because "past me didn't detect this undertone at all", so maybe it'll help someone else recognize it too.
posted by Callisto Prime at 2:50 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

I genuinely never thought of Bashir as Arab, a form of blindness on my part.
Ditto, though I do remember my disappointment when the actor changed his name from Siddig El Fadil. To be clear, I was disappointed with Hollywood, not the actor.
posted by cheshyre at 2:59 PM on April 25 [8 favorites]

Siddig and Robinson were doing a lot of online collabs during COVID lockdowns. In-character script readings, even a little fanfic if I remember correctly. It was just so good and so needed.
posted by xedrik at 4:15 PM on April 25 [9 favorites]

As a Canadian Muslim kid I was so excited to see that DS9 had a Dr. Bashir played by someone named Siddig El-Fadil. It was nice to know that people like me existed in that future.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:13 PM on April 25 [24 favorites]

is it too late to change my username to “a bottle of implied homosexuality”
posted by cabbage raccoon

The psychological swoop of this sentence is incredible, I love the future.
posted by mhoye at 5:13 PM on April 25 [6 favorites]

Garak memes are popular in the corner of the Mastodon world I live in, and they are usually quite queer coded.

"I believe that's where I come in" is a classic.
posted by mhoye at 5:23 PM on April 25 [15 favorites]

> One of the things that Star Trek has consistently worked toward is representation, and especially racial representation. It started with Uhura and Chekov on the bridge,

Uh, Sulu?

I wonder if the interviewer meant to say Sulu there, since Chekov wasn't added until season two. There's a later question about Chekov and the cold war.
posted by justkevin at 5:50 PM on April 25 [2 favorites]

Sulu wasn't a bridge officer at first, though. I don't know when he was promoted to helmsman, but he was like an Engineering officer or something to begin with.
posted by hippybear at 5:55 PM on April 25

I wonder if the interviewer meant to say Sulu there, since Chekov wasn't added until season two. There's a later question about Chekov and the cold war.

Y'all know more about ST than I, having never watched the show except by 15 years of group living proxy. Pretty sure Russian isn't a "race" tho.

Perhaps Russians and Japanese are hard to tell apart, what with the Kurilian Dispute.
posted by MarcWolfe at 6:07 PM on April 25 [1 favorite]

but he was like an Engineering officer or something to begin with.

Astrosciences in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", but he'd made it to helm by "The Corbomite Maneuver" (S1E2).
posted by hanov3r at 6:13 PM on April 25 [4 favorites]

It's been a while since I watched DS9 so I'm probably due for a rewatch but while Bashir was never my favorite character, Siddig brought such depth to him that I really began to enjoy him and his performance. (And while I haven't hated Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange in the MCU & Siddig was not the right age, he was always much closer to who I pictured Strange to be in reality. Maybe that's just me, though.)

I remember really liking Bashir and Garak together. I'm a fan of the concept that if something feels like "this is subtext," it was actually absolutely intentional so I love that it was built into that relationship from the beginning.

This is a great, thoughtful interview.
posted by edencosmic at 6:19 PM on April 25 [2 favorites]

I was always the odd man our for having Bashir as my favorite DS9 character in those early years. And then everyone else came around on him when he became a super-genius, a reveal I hated. I loved the awkward dopy Bashir.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 6:27 PM on April 25 [6 favorites]

Ha. Yeah, Badinage Campervan is doing an awful Dr House impression when Dr Strange should be someone you can actually imagine doing a lot of hard psychedelic drugs.
posted by sixswitch at 7:32 PM on April 25 [7 favorites]

A couple months back, Robinson was a guest at my home convention. I volunteer on the transportation team, so I had the chance to tell him how much I admire his performance of Garak.

He was profuse in his praise of the writers and his costars, and specifically said that he had a lot of fun flirting with Siddig on camera, and was always astonished at how much ended up in the final cut.

Really nice guy.
posted by Vigilant at 8:18 PM on April 25 [21 favorites]

For reasons related to current politics, this well-meaning opening cracked me the fuck up:
You’ve spoken in the past about being a little disconnected from your heritage, but you’re one of only two^ actors with Arab heritage in big Star Trek Roles [the other being Oded Fehr,] and I was wondering if the disconnect casts that in a different light.

^ (I’d overlooked the presence of the fantastic Shohreh Aghdashloo in Star Trek: Beyond).

Oded Fehr, being Israeli, I have never heard him describe himself as Arab, and if he ever refers to himself as Mizrahi I would confess I haven't noticed. Aghdashloo is Iranian - god bless to the writer, may he be protected from the Persian diaspora.
posted by cendawanita at 8:22 PM on April 25 [17 favorites]

"Badinage Campervan is doing an awful Dr House impression when Dr Strange should be someone you can actually imagine doing a lot of hard psychedelic drugs"

pretty sure Dr. House has also done a lot of hard psychedelic drugs

he treats his own migraine with LSD in one of the episodes
posted by Jacqueline at 4:40 AM on April 26

I was one of those people in his fan club in the 90s. He was very gracious to us at the meetup!

I heard that when he changed his stage name, he named himself Alexander after his dog!

Thanks for posting, Artw.
posted by dragonplayer at 6:11 AM on April 26

"Hi, I'm Keiko, and this is my husband Miles, and his husband Julian, and Julian's boyfriend Elim" - they were definitely a polycule.
posted by briank at 8:46 AM on April 26 [10 favorites]

Bashir and Garak's relationship was one of the best parts of DS9. Like sparring partners, obviously friendly, but always a chance that someone might get punched. The actors' chemistry was obvious and Robinson managed to project that air of genteel menace despite the makeup. The contrast with Siddig's earnestness made for a great couple.
posted by tommasz at 12:51 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]

Speaking of our man Garak, Andrew Robinson wrote (and for the audio version, narrated) a fine novel "A Stitch in Time" which fleshes out the character's early days and post-DS9 efforts to help rebuild Cardassia.

In particular, it deals with the poisoning effects of a society becoming militarised and blind to the increasingly audacious and inhumane acts carried out in the name of defending the homeland.

Unfortunately, we STILL don't have the promised sequel, claimed to be co-written by Andrew Robinson and Alexander Siddig, in which their characters would obviously get space married.
posted by seraphine at 1:14 PM on April 26 [4 favorites]