Alexander Siddig played Julian Bashir for seven years as a man who wanted to be admired and slowly stopped needing to be, and it remains his fullest work. Since then he has been the intelligent, watchful man of authority in other people's stories.
Fi1m perspective
Julian Bashir arrives on the station in 1993 wanting to be admired, and Alexander Siddig does not soften that. The young doctor is clever, eager and quick to say so, and nobody is as impressed as he would like. Colm Meaney's O'Brien wants a quiet drink and would rather not be told anything. Their friendship takes years to arrive, and it feels earned because Siddig has let us find Bashir tiresome first. We did not much want to sit with him at the start and were fond of him by the end, and the change is as much in the performance as in the writing: the eagerness stays, but it stops asking to be rewarded.
He stayed seven seasons, to 1999, and directed two episodes along the way, in 1997 and 1998. There is a storyline introduced late in the run that he has said he disliked and tried to work against on screen; we will not describe it, but it is worth knowing he fought it. After the station he went to features: Vertical Limit (2000), then Syriana (2005) as Prince Nasir and, the same year, Kingdom of Heaven for Ridley Scott as Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani. Television took him back: 24 (2007), Game of Thrones (2015–2016) as Doran Martell, Peaky Blinders (2016), Gotham (2017–2018) and Foundation. He has made two films with the director Ruba Nadda, including Cairo Time (2009), in which he has the lead as Tareq Khalifa.
The pattern is hard to miss. Since Syriana he has mostly been cast as an Arab or Middle Eastern man of authority and intelligence, a prince, a scholar, a head of house, and critics consistently notice that he plays these men as people with an inner life rather than as the types the scripts might have settled for. That is a real skill and a narrow door. He has said he tries to avoid the simpler versions of these parts, and the parts have not always made it easy. We have not reviewed the films and will not judge them at length here; the pattern is plain from the credits, and the reader can decide whether it is a compliment.
What we can say from the work we know is that he is good at men who are cleverer than they are liked, and better still when the writing lets them notice it. Bashir is seven years of that, and the payoff is the O'Brien scenes, which took the whole run to become what they are. He has said he had been "kicking and screaming to be a director for the best part of my life." He directed in British theatre before Star Trek found him and directed two episodes once it had. Whether anyone lets him do more of it is the question that hangs over the second half of the career.
Biography
Alexander Siddig is a Sudanese-born British actor and director. He is best known for playing Dr Julian Bashir in the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999), appearing in all seven seasons. He also directed two episodes of the series: "Business as Usual" (1997) and "Profit and Lace" (1998).
Born Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderrahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi on 21 November 1965 in Omdurman, Sudan, he was raised in Britain and trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He began his career credited as Siddig El Fadil before adopting the professional name Alexander Siddig. Other notable television roles include appearances in 24 (2007), Game of Thrones (2015–2016) and Gotham (2015–2019).
