The fourth Ghostbuster on why his part might have been marginalised, how he explained it to his sons – and why he still remembers filming the comedy with fondness

Hi Ernie! It’s 8am in LA where you are. Do you always do interviews this early?

It’s pretty early but I wake up normally at about 5am and go to the gym for about an hour. I’m pretty busy this week, giving talks at conventions (1) and then shooting Hot in Cleveland and Jane Fonda’s new show. I’ve been very blessed and I try to stay busy (2) .

Can you remember where you were when you found out you were cast in Ghostbusters?

Yeah, I was living in Laurel Canyon. I was a single dad and was with my sons. The auditions for Ghostbusters kept dragging out and dragging out so when I finally got the part, the boys and I really celebrated. As soon as I’d read the script I thought, oh my God, this will be really cool.

Was it a fun shoot?

It was. The three guys were very inclusive, very sharing, even though they were at a certain place in their careers where I wasn’t. Harold Ramis especially was always so easy to talk to, and just really down to earth. Bill Murray’s just so much fun to hang with and Danny [Aykroyd] is really great. They’d been working together for years so I had to learn how to jump into that timing and be there in the moment, and Murray’s all about the moment.

Did you stay in touch with them?

Well, in the way that people in this business do. Every time you do a show you exchange numbers and it seems very real at the time, but once you wrap, you gotta get home, you gotta deal with the kids. But I saw Bill Murray recently and it was almost like no time had passed.

I love Ghostbusters but I hate the way they squeezed out your character.

You know, I never bring it up unless someone else does and since you have … I tell people Ghostbusters was the most fun I had, but it was also the most difficult for reasons that I, to this day, do not understand. In the script that I read for the audition, Winston is in the film all the way through the movie. But they changed it just before we shot, so I had to wrap my head around that. I think the studio thought they could sell the guys as they were from Saturday Night Live, and so they wanted to include Winston marginally. But then when we came back five years later for the sequel, they did the same thing! That I didn’t understand. But once you become really angry, it’s all over, so I just kept working and stayed positive.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ernie Hudson, far left, with Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters II. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/REX

So you think it was the studio who cut your character down and not Ramis and Aykroyd, who wrote the script?

You know, nobody tells you. I blame the studio because in my mind it’s easier for me to say “some exec” rather than the guy sitting next to me. I don’t think it came from the guys; the guys are great, but what do I know? But what I have come to appreciate over the 30 years is how amazingly loyal the fans are. No matter where I go, fans quote lines from Winston (3) . I went to buy a car the other day and the mechanic had a tattoo of Winston’s face on his leg. So that I really appreciate.

Some fans think maybe the studio was being racist when they cut you out, and some think the part was originally written for Eddie Murphy.

If I go to the racial side of it and blame that, it takes all my power away, because if I blame racism there’s nothing I can learn from it, and the message to my sons becomes really blurred. I’m telling my boys, you can step out and grow and be and do – and then all of a sudden I’m saying, I’m being shut down because I’m black. So what I have to do is say, maybe there are other reasons. But yeah, had I been as big a star as Eddie Murphy, I don’t think the part would have been cut.

Is it true they turned you down to voice the Winston character in the cartoon of Ghostbusters (4) ?

Yeah, that’s a little weird. They called me up and I said, “Yeah, I wanna do it” because the cartoon could have made a big difference in my life, so they brought me in and the director [of the cartoon] started telling me what “Ernie Hudson in the movie” did and explaining what Ernie Hudson did. It was the weirdest thing! Then I called my agent and they said they thought I was going to be doing something and I’d be too busy or some excuse like that. But I’m telling you, I’d have loved to have done the cartoon and it bothered me that somebody else did Winston, but, once again, Ghostbusters has been a learning and growing experience for me.

You sound so zen about all this, Ernie. I’d be spitting feathers.

You know, I have sons, and in this environment black men can be very marginalised and bad things happen and the attitude I take on about my life, they pick up, and I didn’t want them to go out there like that. So I say, listen man, there are a lot of hard things and you gotta keep going. I can’t make that speech if I’m not living it. So I just say, I’ve studied and trained and I’m ready to work, and you hope that someone out there will let me work and someone always has. So maybe that’s the lesson I needed to learn in this life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ernie Hudson, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters. Photograph: Everett Collection/REX

Footnotes



(1) Hudson does a lot of public speaking, which is not surprising as his speaking voice is like, as Ron Burgundy would say, rich mahogany.

(2) As well as Ghostbusters and hundreds of TV appearances, Hudson’s best known film roles are probably as the wrongly accused gardener in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and as an FBI director in Miss Congeniality.

(3) Classic Winston lines: “If there’s a steady paycheque in it, I’ll believe anything you say”; “I have seen shit that would turn you white” and “I love this town!”

(4) Winston in the cartoon is voiced by Arsenio Hall.

• Ghostbusters returns to cinemas on 28 October