In Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, Orlando Bloom’s Balian, a blacksmith-turned-Crusader-turned-baron, undergoes his “Are we the baddies?” realization almost immediately after meeting the first of the Muslims he’s meant to kill in this religious war. As personified by Alexander Siddig’s turban-donned, horse-riding warrior, they’re brave, braggy, and brash — and honorable in a way that few of Balian’s Christian comrades are. When Siddig’s Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani tells Balian after their first meeting that his “quality will be known among your enemies,” he’s extending a hand of cross-cultural friendship that Balian won’t forget.
Two decades after Kingdom of Heaven’s release, the dignified way it handled Muslim characters like Imad remains practically unparalleled among American blockbusters. Released in the U.S. in May 2005, Kingdom of Heaven’s theatrical cut disappointed critics (aside from champions like Roger Ebert) and underwhelmed at the box office. But after Scott restored 45 minutes of the film in a director’s cut released in December 2005, and that version became available on Blu-ray in 2006, the film’s reputation reversed. (The director’s cut is being re-released in theaters for one night only on May 14, and preorders for a new steelbook 4K coming out May 27 have already sold out.) Kingdom of Heaven has since been embraced as one of Scott’s best swinging-swords epics, and it’s one that Siddig remembers fondly.
The Sudanese and English actor spent seven seasons on the cult favorite series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine playing Chief Medical Officer Julian Bashir. After that show’s run ended in 1999, Siddig was trying to figure out what he wanted to do next when the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 happened. People who looked like him were now being vilified on screen. Kingdom of Heaven was rare in its refusal to go that way, and the role of the chivalric and bombastic Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani exemplified that approach. “I was just so happy to make it through alive, make it through in one piece without disgracing myself or my family,” says Siddig, who this year will be seen in the third season of Apple TV+’s Foundation and the Biblical thriller Zero A.D. “I really like being a supporting actor. I really like being a character actor. It means I get to do different things all the time. I do fancy dress and a lot of the other kids have to wear the same uniform every day, which is very boring.”
Tell me about what Kingdom of Heaven means to you. With which part of your life do you associate that film?
It was a kind of coming-of-age film for me. I’d finished Star Trek. I’d done a couple of films. I hadn’t done Syriana. I was in the transition period. It felt like I was an individual, a person who was striking out now on his own. Because working for Star Trek was a great privilege and a fantastic experience, and a bit like going to college. It took seven years. But once you leave home [laughs], you’re up against the world, and Star Trek actors, at least back in those days, notoriously didn’t really turn those wonderful opportunities into careers. I felt a lot of pressure, and I was extraordinarily lucky to have Ridley Scott give me a gem of a role, a peach of a role, for a young actor unsure of his sea legs. I relished it.
Deep Space Nine ends in 1999. Sept. 11, 2001, happens. What was that period of time like for you? Were you getting offers that were like, “Alexander, we need you to play a terrorist”?
At that stage in my career, I didn’t get offers. You had to fight for every role. Even now, maybe only 25, 30 percent of the things I do are offered to me. I was in the process of getting divorced, which was a bitter blow. Acting was a great escape for that, but I couldn’t get run over, really, immediately after Star Trek. My agent at the time, Pippa Markham — who was an extraordinary force of nature as a human being, one of the most famous British agents of all time — pulled a favor from director Martin Campbell, who was making a movie about mountain climbing in New Zealand called Vertical Limit. She begged him to take me, and he did. That was my first foray into feature films. Back in those days, TV actors and film actors just were not in the same bus, or the same limo.
I got that, and then I got another little movie, and I just waited and waited, and lived off my earnings from Star Trek. I spent a lot of time in England because my stepfather wasn’t particularly well. 9/11 happened, and that changed the way we made films for 10 years. The most astonishing thing, really, was that Fox Studios, who made Kingdom of Heaven, who I associate with the right wing — relatively against any cultural bonhomie, for want of a better way of putting it, any cultural reciprocity — they did something extraordinarily brave. They painted a picture of this great, let’s call him Syrian, Arabian leader, Saladin, as a beneficent, chivalric, human being. This was just three years after 9/11. And for a big Hollywood studio to go, “We’re not gonna do the terrorist thing. We’re going to do a movie about this wonderful human being” — I think in reality, he was a bit of a monster. Anyone who has to fight wars is a monster. But nevertheless! And they cast Ghassan Massoud to play the role, who was this dignified, almost effete, gentleman.
The two of you together on screen are like, some of the most striking men I’ve ever seen in my life.
His wife used to phone me — she got my number from him — just to make sure he was eating. I had to go every day after work to the restaurant over the road from the hotel, pick up food, take it and leave it outside his door. I was the assistant, the manservant to him in real life, as I was to him in the movie. But it was a very difficult time, I’m sure you remember. Islam, rightly or wrongly, at the time was being corporally punished by the West. The only pictures we saw on TV were of screaming women whose children were dead in their arms, or of screaming men beheading someone. That’s awfully unnourishing as a set of visual images that we take in culturally, so people kind of understandably began to really hate Muslims, because we were fed this diet of terror and destruction at the hands of this group of people none of us knew. It was really touching to see the humanization of one of the all-time heroes of the Islamic world, Saladin, right away. I can only assume that someone very high up at Fox had a soul and they greenlit this movie. It was really easy for me to play someone I love, and that kind of set a benchmark for me not to do a terrorist ever again — except I did break that rule because I found ways of playing ambiguous terrorists, or terrorists who come in from the cold, or terrorists who changed their minds.
The humanization of Islam was really important at that time — “Muslims” became all Arabs, didn’t matter. Christians, Copts, Jewish Arabs, they were all tarnished with the same brush. You looked Arab, you were a bad guy. But Saladin certainly was famous in his time for being chivalric, and some would go as far as say that he had invented the notion. Who knows. It was just gratifying to play a role that people could watch and say, “Well, I know an Arab who isn’t a complete asshole,” and that gets at people. That soft diplomacy of movies really can change things in a way that diplomats can’t.
I think that’s why Ridley sometimes loses the final cut. I feel studios easily bully him.
Talk to me about the casting process.
I sent in a tape, and I was picked. My advantage was that of all the Arab actors in the world at that time, I was probably the best-known Western one, even though I hadn’t done many movies. You would have to think very hard to find “out” Arabs. [Laughs.] Having been born in Sahara, I pretty much fit the bill. It was like, He can communicate these sentences without an Arabic accent that he can’t overcome. And so the Western audiences, who primarily speak English, will understand the nuances better, which is generally the problem when you have actors who don’t speak the language as their first language. It was an English script, a very nuanced script. All the English supporting cast do very well with that sort of nuance, and Ridley hires those actors perennially. David Thewlis and Brendan Gleeson, that caliber of stage actor, can chew those words up really well. I was lucky because I was in that category of someone who could speak the language and yet be perceived as foreign enough to do the role. I got away with murder, really.
You get the role. You have about two months before you have to be in Morocco. Were you researching Imad al-Din al-Isfahani as a historical figure?
Every role is different. Sometimes researching actually detracts from playing the role. But it was very important to know a little bit about who he was. Like a lot of roles I play, he wasn’t really a real figure. He was a mix-and-match. One of those people was a diarist who hung out with Saladin all the time, and then there was a general who was his go-to guy, and they probably merged those two real-life characters. I was the witness to Saladin’s life and also his general, which meant I got to play a duality. I see the general thing as a bit more mullah-esque, because you’re just fierce, [growls], and you got a big sword. And on the other side, he has a moment to go meet Orlando’s character and do some soft diplomacy. I attached myself more to the diarist than to the general, because I felt that was something that was really unique to the role and hadn’t been done very often — a sort of softer soldier who clearly had to do unpleasant stuff, which he did, but there was a side of him that was very accessible.
Do you remember the first time you interacted with Ridley? What was that like?
It was well into the film, to meet him off set. I was terrified of him on set, but everybody is, because he’s growly, you know? Well, he was. I’m sure he’s changed now because 20 years have lapsed. But he didn’t take fools lightly. He sat in a tent surrounded by monitors, because he had several cameras all going at the same time, which is commonplace now. In those days, it was pretty rare to have that many cameras working in succession. And he would totally fixate on which way the smoke was going from a particular fire, or which flag was not looking beautiful enough, and he just left the actors completely to themselves. That’s why I never talked to him. I’m not certain of this, but I think actors and acting is not his thing. He knows a terrible performance when he sees it. But he doesn’t get into the philosophy of it, which some directors love to do. I think he hires an actor and goes, “I think they’re good. I’m gonna let them do their thing.” He just obsesses with the minutiae. When I met him, he was extraordinarily diffident, very shy. Very quiet, interested in gossip. And I’m gonna go out on a limb here, because I do not know this, but there was a slight sense of insecurity about his product. Not on set; no insecurity at all, most confident man in the world. But about the thing that comes out of the other end, that comes in the editing room. I heard that occasionally he would ask almost strangers to come and look at cuts and edits. I’m just putting together a hodgepodge of stuff, because I don’t know the man, and I’m only going to pretend to know him for a second. But I think that’s why he sometimes loses the final cut. I feel studios easily bully him. Because his cut is always the best.
The director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven is magnificent.
It’s way better than the first cut. The first cut got panned by the critics, and the person who suffered was Orlando, because they thought he was just rubbish as a lead. But had they understood what was happening, and why his character was kind of failing upwards, and how he didn’t really know why he was there and he was just a little boy, if they understood that about it, they would not be looking for Mel Gibson. They would be going, “Oh, this is a much more interesting take.” Orlando, I don’t think he really recovered from it. So yes, it was lovely to meet Ridley. I met him a couple of times. I spent more time with the costume designer, Janty Yates, who used me as a play doll to put on everybody’s costume. I was there for five hours one day. Janty had me in that room, draping every material over me to see whether it would work. She knew Ridley inside out, what colors he wanted, and there were golds and they were greens. She put me in stuff that Eva Green eventually put on. She would just use me. [Laughs.] She knew a soft touch when she saw one.
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Tell me about when you get to Morocco. I know the big Jerusalem set was built there.
It was warm and breezy, and the Moroccans are just lovely, and everybody’s eager to please. They were very happy that the movie was there and Ridley is a big friend, I think, of the King of Morocco, so red carpet for him. We had the finest hotel, which was bungalows on a big compound. Everybody would hang out around the swimming pool. Brendan Gleeson would play the fiddle; every Friday or Saturday night, he’d be out playing Irish folk tunes. That’s actually really a British thing. Generally the theater vibe is, you do a play, and you go to the pub. The curtain comes down at 10 or 10:30, and you go straight to the bar and hang out with anybody who wants to talk to you for as long as possible. [Laughs.] So it’s not unusual for that gang to all be like, “Let’s have a drink.” There is only one bar and restaurant in the hotel and it’s huge, tables everywhere, all around the pool. It’s quite pleasant to go and chill out, and drink Casablancas, the beer, and have some almonds. It was a really convivial atmosphere, and the movie was well into its process by the time I got to it. They’d already done three months in Spain, and then we did three months in Morocco to do all the desert stuff, from late February to May. All of our acting was done in Ouarzazate, which is now famous for its filmmaking. The Jerusalem set, I actually just worked on it the other day. Still there.
It was important, I think, that the real aggressors here are … white. [Laughs.] Which is what comes across, and a lot of people didn’t like that.
Your first scene, where you’re on horseback and you tell Orlando’s Balian that the horse he tried to take is a Muslim lord’s “because it is on his land,” is very much a Lawrence of Arabia homage. What do you remember about filming that scene?
It is really, really very clear that it was an homage to David Lean, and I was like, “Great! This is fun. I get to play the Faisal character again,” because I’d already played him once before. I always was a fairly good rider, but I had never reared on a horse before and I had to be taught how to do that, how to tell the horse when to do it. They train it so well that just up you go. Working with horses is extraordinarily technical. You’re with the best horse in the world, hitting a point in the sand which can’t be marked because it’s on film, so you gotta geolocate yourself between where the camera is and where maybe some bush is, and go, “It’s gotta be around there.” If you miss it by four or five inches, you’re out of focus, and you have to do it again. But I prided myself on being a technical actor, which I still am, and I kind of nailed all that. What was really difficult was the wind. You had airborne sand flying through the air, and it would scrape my eyeballs. It was incredibly uncomfortable environmentally. Jeremy Irons loved his horse so much, he bought it, took it back with him. He bought most of Morocco. We went to the casbah together in Marrakesh, Ed Norton and Jeremy Irons and Marton Csokas. We all went for a weekend in the middle of filming. The next morning Jeremy said, “I’m going shopping!” Off we went. Everybody had clearly been alerted that Jeremy was coming. The doors were open. He just pointed at things, and some other person was just taking notes. Myth has it one of the crew trucks was driven back to England, and he went, “Oh, and I’ll have the horse, too.”
In terms of acting, I was really lucky that Orlando was the other guy in that scene, because he is a very kindred spirit. He might not think so, but I did. He was a similar sort of human being to me: lover, not a fighter; try and be nice to everybody. He had a lot of work to do, and he was constantly with his trainer doing all sorts of annoying things which I would have hated — tons of bottles of whatever the hell weight lifters drink, chicken and rice, getting up at 4 a.m. to do his workouts before going to the movie at 6. But he was a really sweet man. Orlando had already made several big films already, and so he was a total pro at this stuff. He made me feel very comfortable. It was a relatively nice, easy way in, and given that I wasn’t really talking much to Ridley, the fact that we were working quite well together and we had a certain chemistry — I think audiences could probably see a parallel in our characters, in terms of our souls.
As a character, you immediately have swagger. You’re gesturing to the entire landscape with your arms raised. You’re really selling it.
Yeah, it was his home! This guy was in his home, and Arabs are effusive. [Laughs.] Everything’s huge. It’s totally bipolar — it’s tragic or great, and there’s not really much in the middle. That was something I just understood about my family. But also, costume is extraordinarily important, and my costumes were extravagant. Janty was adorning me with more and more layers of opulent stuff, satin and silk. When I saw the film, everybody looks spectacular. You could tell who everybody was, what sects they came from, the bad guys, the good guys, and you can almost see it without them opening their mouths, because that’s the kind of detail Ridley gets into. It’s part of the movie. It’s as important to him as the lighting or the acting, getting all that stuff right. A lot of the swagger comes from the look, the impression you get, and I really didn’t have to do very much apart from be as convincingly Arab as I could.
There’s a moment later, after a major battle sequence where you have bested Orlando and his army, and you tell him, “As you deserve, you reap what you sow.” You put a little sarcasm on the line. Did you want your character to seem funny?
It was really important to me, and to writer Bill Monahan, that this character was the window into the soul of the Arab world. Saladin was taciturn. Very wise and powerful, but [settles face into a blank expression]. Khaled Nabawy’s character, the mullah, is just fanatical. There needed to be some method of reaching through the movie to the audience to go, “This is where some of the soul of the film is.” Those scenes with Orlando are very important because they said to everybody, “We may be at war with each other, but we really love each other.” It’s a bit like that story from the First World War — on Christmas Day, the Germans and the English soldiers got out of the trenches and they played soccer, and then they went back. That scene was kind of a soccer moment. Let’s put down all the stuff and say hi, and know that we’re both human; then let’s get back to it. And also it was important, I think, to Ridley and to Bill, that the real aggressors here are … white. [Laughs.] Which is what comes across, and a lot of people didn’t like that.
I still rewatch the film and think, How did they make this so soon after 9/11?
What a brave act. No one mentions it. No one talks about it. Robert Fisk, a great journalist, a Middle East correspondent, said he saw the movie in Beirut and the audience just erupted and cheered when these moments happened. Because they desperately needed someone to notice that they weren’t all wild animals.
Syriana also does this.
Did the same thing. I was absolutely obsessed with this idea. In fact, I left the Kingdom of Heaven set to go and talk to Stephen Gaghan, the director of Syriana. Ridley got me the job because he was like, “I’ve got the guy who can do that.” I didn’t actually have to do anything but read from the page in front of Steve, which is a very cushy, easy audition to do. As an actor, you always know when you’re meeting the director, you’ve got half a chance. When you’re battering away with casting directors, you’ve got no chance unless they pluck you out.
Tell me about working with Ghassan. What was that relationship like, aside from you making sure he ate?
We talked as much as we could. We obviously spent a lot of time together. With Ridley, maybe half the day is sitting around waiting for big elaborate sequences to be set up, and things to be moved from one place, and horses to be corralled. The Moroccan cavalry lent a hand, so there were 300 of them who had to be gotten ready before a shot. It could take a long time before anything could happen. We would sit with a cup of tea and we talked as best we could. His English is pretty good but not great. He is extraordinarily dignified. Primarily, he ran the Damascus Opera House; that was his day job. He was extraordinarily well-versed in classical Arabic music and theatre. We met again five or six years ago. We were thrilled.
I’m obsessed with the scene where you two are walking off the battlefield into your tent, and you retrieve a goblet and fill it with ice from an ice chest.
That was a true thing. That was a scene of Imad as the writer, the witness, the diarist. Saladin famously had ice brought down from the mountains for him and for guests, which is astonishing, given it’s the desert. It was very important that we get that in. A lot of people would probably miss it, because you can get ice everywhere. But for that time, that was very bizarre. It was an artistic detail like you would see in a Caravaggio.
You’ve talked about Kingdom of Heaven being a transition point for you. How do you think it changed how people viewed you as an actor?
I don’t know. I know that Syriana changed how people looked at me. Critics paid attention. I really became kind of established for a second there, and people went out of their way to say things, which was really nice, and there was Oscar buzz, silly things like that. But that changes everything. Once a critic writes, “You’re a good actor,” you’re a good actor. That’s that. Syriana started that snowball for me. I was on a radar. I’m now on lists, which is great. It means that I get a shot at it, I get a look. It means I don’t have to send my headshot anywhere, and it doesn’t matter that my IMDb photo is from 1972. [Laughs.]
You’ve said “The Arab roles I play are not designed for Arab people. They are designed for the West.” I’m curious if you thought of Kingdom of Heaven in that way.
I’m a product of East-West, Occident and Oriental, in Edward Said’s phraseology. His books influenced me a great deal. When you understand that I’m 100 percent English and 100 percent Sudanese, then I have the freedom to be an interlocutor, to be the go-between. I took it on myself after 9/11, and recoiling from all of that, to nominate myself to be the messenger between both tribes. That has been a theme; I think it’s probably gone on right to this day.
I love this movie, but I struggle with Ridley’s quote from when he was making Exodus: Gods and Kings, where he said that he couldn’t get a film financed if it starred “Mohammad so-and-so.” It feels difficult for me to reconcile the man who made Kingdom of Heaven, which has so much important Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern representation, with a man who would say that. I’m wondering if you had a reaction to that quote.
I don’t know if it’s true, but I did hear of that quote. And it was disappointing. I think it was a lapse of judgment, if indeed he said it. There were plenty of big-enough Arab actors, and you know, you didn’t actually have to have an Arab actor. You could have had someone who was just convincingly Arab. It’s not terribly important where someone is actually from, because it’s an accident. But how you portray them, and with what sympathy you portray those people, is what matters to an actor, and certainly matters to an audience. I reckon that Ridley regrets that comment. Because he certainly wasn’t that way.
For the film Zero A.D., directed by Alejandro Monteverde and costarring Sam Worthington, Ben Mendelsohn, and Gael García Bernal Siddig played Faisal I of Iraq, the role played by Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia, in the 1992 TV film A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia.
