NiceGirlsTV.com Nice Girls watch TV…then talk about it behind your back.
Congratulations to our new Nice Boy of the Week, Alexander Siddig! Since the recent announcement that Sid will star in BBC’s Primeval, and since he is a Nice Girl favorite, this was a no-brainer.
Siddig gained much attention as the lovable Dr. Julian Bashir in the Star Trek hit spin-off, Deep Space Nine. He 
created more buzz when he guest starred in a multi-episode arc on Fox’s 24. He’s such a talented actor, I’m surprised we don’t see more of him in television and film. His television credits include, besides DS9 and 24, Spooks and Poirot: Cards on the Table and Merlin. His film credits need special attention, for this is where I have seen Sid shine even more: Syriana, Kingdom of Heaven, Cairo Time, Reign of Fire, Doomsday, The Nativity Story, Hannibal, The Last Legion, Un Homme Perdu, A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, Vertical Limit, The Boundary. And if you were lucky enough to catch Sid on stage, you probably saw him in Who’s Life Is It Anyway.
We have been fans of Sid for a very long time; Melissa has run his official fansite, SidCity, since 1996. I remember seeing Sid for the first time when Dr. Bashir visited Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it was after seeing Sid in Kingdom of Heaven (the director’s cut), that I had to find out more about this handsome, intense actor. So I visited Melissa’s fansite and have been a fan ever since. I did use the word ‘intense’, but Sid has a very humorous side as well. Through letters he’s written to his fans, interviews and a phone conversation I was privileged to participate in with Melissa and Sid, I discovered that Sid has a way of telling a story that could keep you in stitches, whether it was meant to be funny or not. I still maintain that he should write a book about his life and call it I Have a Funny Side Too.
As mentioned above, Sid has recently been added to the cast of BBC’s Primeval. The series follows Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) and his team as they investigate anomalies in time found in the Forest of Dean, allowing creatures and objects to pass between different eras in history, both past and future. Why am I not watching this show? Now I’m interested, and if Sid is going to be on it, put me down for a double dose of this Primeval Nice Boy!
I haven’t really watched much of his stuff aside from DS9, though half the time I think of him as Siddig el Fadil and half the time it’s Alexander. What reason did he have for changing his name, or was it simply a Hollywood thing?
Here’s Sid’s explanation from an October 1995 appearance, shortly after the name change was announced: “Actually my name hasn’t changed, just my stage name. One of the problems was that one of my old friends. . .didn’t know how to say my second name (El Fadil). And of course he couldn’t spell it. So we got to talking about what other names we might choose for me. And we rolled them off and we came up with some stupid names and some not so stupid names. In the end we decided we would definitely try to work out a way to try to change my name. My mother, before I was born, wanted to call me a European name and a Sudanese name. [Sid’s mother is English, his father is Sudanese.] She wanted to call me Adrian or some such name, I’m not sure what it was, and so I came back to my mother and said ‘well I think I’m going to change my name to what you probably wanted to do in the first place’ – because she was put under a lot of pressure to call me Siddig El Fadil la la la la la. . . There was a point where I was going to call myself ‘uh’ because people would walk up to me in the street and say ‘hey you’re, uh…’ That would just make it a lot easier for them. And I could just say ‘yes I am!’ Well the long and short of it was that, as much out of a sense of mischieviousness, I just changed my name…and I might do it again! I might do it again every year from now on and I’ll be remembered as the person who changed their name.”