Deep Space Nine’s Avery Brooks Changed His Benjamin Sisko Look

Most “Star Trek” captains have a signature look. Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) both have truly fabulous hair, while Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is known for being clean-shaven and bald. But “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” captain Benjamin Sisko, played by Avery Brooks, went through a bit more change than the average leader on the series. It makes sense in the show; Sisko is arguably the best and most complex “Star Trek” captain, and he goes through the stresses of commanding a space station during a terrible war. Anyone who grows and changes as much as he does is bound to alter their appearance a bit, but the real-life reasons for Sisko’s changing looks between the seasons were a little more frustrating.

Throughout most of the first three seasons of “Deep Space Nine,” Brooks is clean-shaven, growing a goatee toward the end of season 3. In the season 4 premiere, though, he’s kept the beard and shaved his head, and the change is enormous. Not only does he look different, but the entire vibe is different, and it helps take Sisko to another level as a character. He also finally gets a promotion from commander to captain, and it seems like the power dynamics shifted behind-the-scenes a bit, too.

The writers of “Deep Space Nine” clearly had a hard time figuring out how to write Sisko to begin with, with writer Ira Steven Behr initially believing the character was a mistake for the series. Behr would eventually change his tune, however, and help fight for a change in the character’s appearance that would help make Brooks more comfortable in the role. Initially, executives believed that it would be a problem for Brooks to have the same goatee and shaved head as Sisko that he had playing enforcer Hawk on the TV shows “Spenser for Hire” and “A Man Called Hawk.” Their reasoning? According to studio executive Kerry McCluggage in the documentary “What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” they “thought it would be a mistake to go, for lack of a better term, ‘street.'”

Eventually, Behr and executive producer/writer Rick Berman teamed up to convince McCluggage to let Brooks have a look he was more comfortable with — a rare team-up between the pair, who usually couldn’t agree on much of anything. McCluggage thankfully backed off of his (honestly pretty racist) reasoning and Brooks was able to appear as his most authentic self, which had a major impact on his performance. 

In “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years” by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, screenwriter Robert Hewitt Wolfe questioned the initial logic, asking “Why shouldn’t you let the guy look like himself?” Meanwhile, Terry Farrell, who played science officer Jadzia Dax, was a bit more blunt about it:

“Avery wanted that look from day one. For us, the notion of the white man ‘holding us down’ is not a thing, but for Avery it was. I can’t even imagine what the poor man went through with those guys. With Rick Berman. It’s like they stripped him of his power. But then as soon as he got to be his physical image and he stopped looking like a Black Ken doll — I’m sorry, it’s true! — and got to look like his vision of Sisko, it was like night and day.”

Farrell is right on the money (about the Ken doll thing too), because it’s clear that Brooks is much more comfortable in the Starfleet uniform once he has a look he identifies with, and Sisko becomes a much more powerful figure in the process. Strong Black men in heroic positions were incredibly rare on television in the mid-1990s, so Sisko was groundbreaking in many ways. Initially, the show tried to make him a bit too “Middle American,” in the words of actor J.G. Hertzler, who played the Klingon commander Martok, but the right move was to let Brooks actually draw on his Blackness and who he really was. 

Sisko doesn’t just feel restrained in those early episodes, but he also feels a bit neutered, too. In “What We Left Behind,” Penny Johnson Jerald, who played Sisko’s love interest, freighter captain Kasidy Yates, explained it simply, saying, “When the bald came, and that goatee, that had some strength, like you can’t even communicate. It was terribly sexy.” Their onscreen chemistry changed too, as the pair’s relationship deepened. Unlike Kirk and Picard, Sisko actually raised his son, Jakes (Cirroc Lofton), and his relationship with Kasidy was occasionally fraught but deeply romantic. From season 4 onward, Benjamin Sisko is a bonafide Daddy in more ways than one. Sexiness in “Star Trek” is important, after all, and the franchise’s first Black captain should get to be a part of that legacy.

It’s worth noting that the change in appearance also comes with Sisko’s promotion, and Brooks started directing more episodes as well, including the season 6 masterpiece “Far Beyond the Stars.” All of this led to Brooks taking a real position of power onscreen, cementing himself as one of the greatest television characters of all time.