With any franchise that’s been around as long as Star Trek has, there are always going to be a certain number of tantalizing “what-ifs.” From narrative swerves (What if Christopher Pike was never injured and remained the Enterprise’s captain?) to casting choices (What if Mitchell Ryan played Jean-Luc Picard instead of Patrick Stewart?), the current configuration of the series’ onscreen universe could have gone in a lot of different directions, some of which seem kind of nuts when looked at from our modern-day perspective. But some are downright intriguing. Like the idea that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s captain could have been played by a former Ghostbuster. cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Don’t get me wrong, Avery Brooks is an iconic performer. The first Black actor to lead a Star Trek series, he reportedly beat out over 100 other actors for the role of Captain Benjamin Sisko. And with good reason; his performance throughout DS9’s seven seasons was tremendous, running the gamut from calm intensity to bombastic theatrics and everything in between. His take on the character is so idiosyncratic and recognizable that it’s difficult now to imagine anyone else in the role. But had fate taken another path, the commander of DS9 might have been someone very different.Actor Ernie Hudson, best known for his portrayal of Winston Zeddemore in the Ghostbusters franchise, was apparently one of the many performers who threw their hat in the ring for the role of Sisko. Speaking to Bleeding Cool about his role in the CBS procedural Boston Blue (in which he stars alongside former Star Trek: Discovery captain Sonequa Martin-Green), Hudson was frank about the process, explicitly noting his initial assumption that the producers would never make the captain of the series a Black man. (Sisko would go on to officially become a captain in DS9 season 3; nearly 30 years later, Martin-Green would play the franchise’s first Black female captain.)“They told me they wanted me to come in, so I went into the audition, and I read. I thought I did a good reading, and they liked me, then they wanted me to come back the next day,” Hudson said. “They told me to ‘make him sexier,” and now I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what that means, so I went to the meeting, and I did an Elvis [Presley] thing, and it was ridiculous. Halfway through my reading, they said, “Thank you. That’s enough,” so I didn’t get the role. But I’ve always been a fan of Star Trek, Star Wars, and all those things, but hadn’t been asked to be in them for whatever reason. I suppose there are still possibilities, but yeah”Let’s be real, attempting to picture a sexier, “Elvis”-like take on Sisko is… well, quite frankly, it’s kind of alarming. But it is fun to speculate about whether casting someone like Hudson, who was more of a mainstream star at the time, might have brought an influx of new viewers to the franchise, or how his portrayal would have reshaped the character we now all know so well. Sisko definitely doesn’t seem like a guy who would be particularly interested in busting ghosts, but if Hudson had nabbed the part, is there any doubt we would have seen at least one episode about a haunted space station?The post The Ghostbusters Star Who Almost Became a Star Trek Captain appeared first on Den of Geek.