A stage actor who spoke on television as if it were theatre, Avery Brooks made Benjamin Sisko a captain Star Trek had not had before: slow, formal, grieving, better in a crisis than in a meeting. Film never knew what to do with him.
Fi1m perspective
Listen to how Avery Brooks says a line. Every word gets its full weight, the vowels are long, and there is a pause where most television actors would hurry on. In a staff meeting on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) it can sound stiff, as if he were reading a proclamation to people who only wanted the duty roster. When the station is about to be lost it sounds like the one voice aboard worth hearing. Brooks came from the stage and never pretended otherwise, and the series took two seasons to learn when to put him in a small room and when to give him a war.
He was a professor of theatre arts at Rutgers before television found him, and he toured a one-man show as Paul Robeson from 1982. Hawk in Spenser: For Hire (1985) made him a known face: the shaved head, the goatee, the deep baritone. Then seven seasons as Sisko, from 1993 to 1999, and nine episodes behind the camera. After that there were two films, American History X (1998) and 15 Minutes (2001), and then nothing on screen; he went back to the theatre, to music and to teaching. That is the whole screen career, and most of it is one part.
It is a very good part, and he is the reason. The pilot got to us far more than a pilot should: a widower sitting on the floor of a burning corridor, told by beings that do not understand time that he has never left it. Brooks plays it quietly, without once raising his voice, and it is the best thing in that first episode. The other thing he does that few actors manage is the father. His scenes with Cirroc Lofton as Jake are the warmest in the series, and they are warm without going soft; Sisko is stern and Jake is allowed to argue back. "All I'm interested in is telling the truth," Brooks said of one of those episodes, and for once an actor's line about his own method describes what is on the screen.
As a director he is remembered for "Far Beyond the Stars" (1998), which takes the regular cast out of the station and into a story about racial injustice, and which is composed with more care than the average episode of anything. We have not reviewed it on its own, so we will say only that it is the episode people who dislike Star Trek are shown first, and there is a reason.
The formality never quite leaves him, and film did not know how to use it. In American History X he plays Sweeney, the teacher trying to pull Edward Norton's skinhead back, and Tony Kaye's film hands him explanations and hurries him through them; our review found the whole film short of room for doubt, and Brooks is one of the people given none. He stopped acting on camera in the early 2010s, having last stood in front of one in 2001. The pity is not that he left. It is that seven years on a space station were the only sustained stretch anyone offered him.
Biography
Avery Brooks is an American actor, director, singer and educator. He is best known for his role as Captain Benjamin Sisko in the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999) and as Dr Bob Sweeney in the film American History X (1998). He also played Hawk in Spenser: For Hire (1985–1988) and its spin-off A Man Called Hawk.
Born in Evansville, Indiana, Brooks attended Oberlin College and Rutgers University, where he became the first African American to receive an MFA in acting and directing. He began his professional career on stage in the 1970s, with notable Broadway and off-Broadway appearances including multiple productions as Paul Robeson. Brooks has directed episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and worked as a narrator and voice actor.
