Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Game of Thrones actor Alexander Siddig entertains fans in Sid City Social Club online chats
Social distancing and shelter-in-place policies have meant that many fan conventions of the spring and summer have been postponed and some of them have been cancelled outright. In fact, according to the convention listing website fancons.com, April 2020 was the first month to not feature any kind of public fan event since January of 1974. But website The Mary Sue recently spotlighted one Trek actor’s efforts to keep reaching out to fans in the virtual space.
Alexander Siddig is known to audiences for playing Julian Bashir on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and for his roles on Game of Thrones, Gotham, and in the films Syriana and Kingdom of Heaven. Like many of us, he’s been stuck indoors due to the COVID-19 outbreak, unable to work or make appearances. To combat that isolation, he’s started a series of weekly online gatherings with his official fan club, Sid City, called the Sid City Social Club, giving fans an opportunity to interact with himself and each other. Meetings of the Club take place on Zoom and Siddig uses the time to chat with fans, answer their questions, listen to their personal anecdotes, and share his own experiences dealing with life in quarantine. And Siddig isn’t the only Trek star who’s a club member; attendees were treated to a special surprise last week when Garak actor Andrew Robinson unexpectedly joined the stream to chat with both Siddig and fans.
If you want to join the Sid City Social Club, you can! Just head to SidCity.net. The next live Zoom is tonight, Tuesday, May 12th at 9pm ET and will run for two hours, but be aware that there’s a few rules to participating. There are more details on the site.
Of course, if you can’t make the stream or aren’t able to get in due to the number of participants, you can catch highlights of each session on the Sid City YouTube page. And if you want to keep up with details about future meetings, they’re updated weekly on the Sid City website and announced on Twitter and Facebook.