Ernie Hudson says being "pushed aside" in Ghostbusters marketing "felt deliberate"

It’s not a new criticism that Ernie Hudson’s Ghostbusters character, Winston Zeddemore, is among modern moviemaking’s most unfairly treated characters. Zeddemore’s accomplishments include saving New York City from a giant marshmallow man, driving the Statue of Liberty, and gazing upon the unholy CGI Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Heck, he even gets one of the best lines in the movie (“I love this town!”). Representing one-fourth of the original Ghostbusters, Zeddemore is a Big Apple legend, even if the ad wizards at Columbia Pictures were too afraid to acknowledge it in the marketing.

While fans at home probably had a hint as to why the one Black Ghostbuster wasn’t included in the marketing for the movie, the film’s impact was a difficult one for actor Ernie Hudson to live through. Speaking with SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Wrap Up Show, Hudson revealed that living with the success of Ghostbusters hasn’t been easy.

Hudson calls himself “the guy who was brought in” as his fellow Busters, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Bill Murray, had starred in numerous projects together. Aykroyd and Ramis wrote the film, and Murray joined the project after fellow SNL castmate John Belushi died. All three also had an ongoing working relationship with director Ivan Reitman, who Hudson calls “really a brilliant man” and someone he has “so much love and appreciation for.” Hudson maintains, “they were all welcoming and inclusive.” Columbia? Not so much. “The studio wasn’t, and the studio continued not to be,” he said. “So it made it very, very difficult because I was a part of it, but then I, very selectively, was pushed aside.”

The issues began with a script change made after Hudson was hired. As originally written, “Winston was in the very beginning of the movie.” However, the shooting script punted the character to the halfway mark, which he says “felt deliberate.”

Things only got worse for Hudson when Columbia marketed the movie. He wasn’t on the original poster, and even decades later, his image was missing from materials. “I went to the 30th-anniversary release of the movie, and all the posters are three guys,” he said. “Now I know the fans see it differently, and I’m so thankful for the fans because the fans basically identified with Winston, especially young—I don’t want to say minority kids—but a lot of kids.”

“It wasn’t an easy road,” he continued. “It was probably the most difficult movie I ever did just from the psychological perspective. And I’m still not trying to take it personally. If you’re African American in this country, anything bad happens to you, you can always blame it on ‘because I’m Black.’ You don’t want to go there. That’s the last thing I want to do. I got nothing bad to say about anybody, but it was hard. It took me 10 years to get past that and enjoy the movie and just embrace the movie. Ghostbusters was really hard to make peace with it.”

Ultimately, Ghostbusters continues to be a struggle for the actor, stamping an asterisk on his first success in the industry. “When you start out in the business, I was always told it’s almost impossible to succeed. But if you get in a major movie from a major studio, and it comes out, and it opens number one, it will change your career,” he said. “Well, Ghostbusters didn’t do any of that for me. I was working pretty nonstop. I did Ghostbusters,’ and it was two and a half years before I got another movie.”

Hudson reprised the role several times for Ghostbusters II and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. He also had a brief cameo in the 2016 reboot. And yet, he still feels treated like “an add-on.”

“Even now, we’re negotiating a new movie that’s gearing up to start shooting in March, and I’m like, ‘Guys, I’m not an add-on.’ So if I’m going to do it, it has to make sense.”

[via IndieWire]