“It seemed they didn’t want me”: the movie role Ernie Hudson was banned from playing on TV
For most actors, franchise roles are the gift that keeps on giving, allowing them to make lucrative returns for years, if not decades. Ernie Hudson has one of them to call his own, but the Ghostbusters star discovered that not all parts are created equal.
It might seem shocking given that the classic 1984 fantasy comedy is the actor’s most iconic role, bar none, and he’s beloved by fans for his work, even if he was cast fairly late in the day in a role that Eddie Murphy turned down, which he’d also describe as the most difficult movie of his career.
In most cases, if a successful movie is spun off into an animated series aimed at a younger audience, the original cast wouldn’t bother returning. That was the case for Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, and Dan Aykroyd, but the major difference was that Hudson wanted to voice Winston Zeddemore in The Real Ghostbusters ahead of its 1986 debut; he just wasn’t allowed to.
“I’d done a lot of animated work by then, but for whatever reason, it seemed they didn’t want me,” he explained. “And that would have made a huge difference at the time in my life.” You might presume that two years after the release of the first Ghostbusters movie, which was a box office smash, the supporting actor would have had a blossoming career.
Sadly, he was so sidelined by the studio that the great career change he was promised didn’t come until later. And so, when it came time to voice his character again for the animated series, since he’d already played the character in live-action, he assumed that he’d have first dibs on stepping into the booth and voicing Winston in the show.
It was a cruelly ironic turn of events: Hudson was paid much less than the other three Ghostbusters for Ivan Reitman’s caper, but he would still have cost more to recruit for The Real Ghostbusters than a voice actor who didn’t have an extensive film and television career behind them, so his pleas fell on deaf ears.
It must have been an odd situation for the actor to find himself in: he felt like he’d been shunted to the background in the movie, which he had every right to believe, and then when he discovered that the fantasy favourite was heading to the small screen, he wasn’t even under consideration at all, despite putting himself forward as the only original cast member willing to reprise their role.
Fortunately, despite the studio’s initial attempts to minimise him, the rest of the cast and crew weren’t having it. Bill Murray, for example, made sure that Hudson was just as involved as the rest of the cast when it came to events and reunions. “He’s the one who always says, ‘I will not do another Ghostbusters movie unless Ernie’s involved’,” he explained.
Hudson, thankfully, didn’t let the studio get to him, being the consummate professional and simply carrying on his work to the best of his ability. Although he wasn’t allowed to reprise his role for The Real Ghostbusters, he did return as Winston throughout the film series, most recently in 2024’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
