Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Julian Bashir

Before Bashir, and indeed before Alexander Siddig, there was Amoros, Julian Amoros. Julian was not quite the "blank canvas" Siddig auditioned for, as the actor put it in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine DVD extra Crew Dossier — Julian Bashir, but there were plenty of differences (and similarities) between the characterisation of Amoros and the Bashir that made it to screen.

In the 12 June 1992 draft of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series bible, "DR. JULIAN AMOROS" is, as per Bashir, a "human, male, mid-twenties," but, unlike Bashir, Amoros already held the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Akin to Bashir once more, Amoros is described as "naïve," with "gung-ho expectations" about his first assignment out of the Academy, an assignment he'd chosen over "the cushy job" he could have taken at Starfleet Medical.

Quite unlike Bashir, however, Amoros was "charming and cocky all at the same time," or as writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe stated in The Fifty-Year Mission, he was "a little more suave, with a little more in the way of personal skills […], [not] as prone to shoving his foot completely into his mouth". In the June bible, Amoros also "like[d] to go to the phaser firing range to practice with O'Brien". Definitely not! Although, then again, I suppose that is basically a high-tech version of darts!

Amoros became Bashir after producers had met Siddig (in L.A.), and it was the actor's interpretation of the character that then served to re-shape Bashir's personality. As Siddig himself put it in the Crew Dossier DVD extra, "I could play him as someone who was genuinely freaked out by arriving in space, as I was genuinely freaked out by arriving in Los Angeles".