Peter Capaldi reveals how he auditioned for the role of Captain Benjamin Sisko in DS9.
This Christmas will see the final performance by Peter Capaldi in his tenure as Doctor Who, which will usher in the era of the first female Doctor with Jodie Whittaker taking on the role, but Capaldi had previously toyed with the idea of taking on a major role in another iconic science fiction show, Star Trek. Capaldi previously revealed that he had been offered to audition for the role of the eighth incarnation of the Doctor, which was eventually taken by Paul McGann in the TV movie version of the longest running British Science Fiction programme. Capaldi talked about how he received the offer in 1996;
“I knew I wouldn’t get it. I loved the show so much that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it unless it was going to be me. I didn’t want to have the disappointment and go through all the palaver of jumping through hoops for something that I would never get. Because I knew it was an American pilot, and I knew they would go for somebody who was well-known – which Paul was, and he was fantastic. So I didn’t go along for the audition. I said to my agent ‘Thank you very much, but I don’t want to go along.’”
Now news has emerged that the actor also fancied a stint on the bridge as well as the Tardis counsel and previously auditioned for the role of Captain Benjamin Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The British contingent didn’t stop there, with fellow British thespian and star of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Anthony Head also throwing his hat into the ring for the role that was eventually won by Avery Brooks. It appears that both were probably an outside bet at best with Deep Space Nine’s Show Boss Ira Steven Behr stating that the plan had always been for the Benjamin Sisko character to come from an ethnic background;
“When [co-creator] Michal Piller started his insidious plan to bring me back into the fold – so sitting together at baseball games, when he mentioned it to me, he mentioned to me as an African-American captain,” Behr told TrekMovie.com.
“Some people say that is too specific and that it was definitely going to be a brown person, definitely not a Caucasian. They hadn’t necessarily locked in to that person being African-American.”
This little snippet of information comes thanks to the efforts of the @trekdocs Twitter account, an anonymous team of Star Trek fans who regularly unearth interesting documents from the series and who uncovered a UK casting session for Deep Space Nine from 1992.