What Avery Brooks Has Been Up To Since Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The "Star Trek" franchise has a long line of illustrious captains across the past 60 years... but we haven't seen much of one of them on screen since he left the bridge.

Avery Brooks starred as Captain Benjamin Sisko on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," which enjoyed a seven-season run in syndication from 1993 to 1999. (TV fans will also remember him as Spenser's cooler-than-cool sidekick Hawk on the ABC crime drama "Spenser: For Hire.") Brooks played the first Black captain to lead a "Star Trek" series, and his commanding performance made Sisko a fan favorite during "Deep Space Nine's" run. (His real-life love of baseball became one of Sisko's signature character traits.) 

But just two years after "Deep Space Nine" wrapped up, Brooks registered his last on-screen role in the 2001 Robert De Niro film "15 Minutes." In the quarter-century since, he hasn't appeared on camera in a scripted TV show or film. Brooks is still alive and well, thankfully, at age 78. So what has he been up to for the past 25 years? 

After his last on-camera role, Avery Brooks returned to the theater, where his acting career began. (He first made a name for himself on stage in the 1970s, with roles in productions of "Othello" and "Fences" that predated his time on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.") In the years after "DS9," he starred in a production of "King Lear" at Yale University and then returned to the title role of "Othello" for the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington D.C. in 2005. He also starred as Willy Loman in a 2008 production of "Death of a Salesman" at Brooks' alma mater Oberlin College.

Though he didn't appear on screen, Brooks did lend his distinctive voice to narrate several documentary films and TV shows, including "Walking With Dinosaurs" and "The Bible's Greatest Secrets." He also appeared alongside fellow "Star Trek" captains William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Bakula, and Chris Pine in the 2011 documentary "The Captains," with Shatner interviewing him about his time on "Deep Space Nine." 

Plus, Brooks has devoted a large part of his post-"DS9" life to music, with a singing career that dates back to the '70s. ("Star Trek" fans will remember that Sisko sang Frank Sinatra's "The Best Is Yet to Come" in a Season 7 episode.) Brooks went on to record an album of jazz and blues covers, along with a number of spoken word pieces... and one of those pieces led to him reconnecting to the "Star Trek" universe earlier this year. 

In a February episode of the new Paramount+ series "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy," holographic cadet Sam set out to discover what really happened to Benjamin Sisko, a quest that led her to connect with Sisko's son Jake, with Cirroc Lofton reprising his "Deep Space Nine" role. As the episode drew to a close, we heard a familiar voice rhapsodizing about how "divine laws are simpler than human ones." It also ended with a on-screen card that read: "Thank you, Avery."

Yes, that was Avery Brooks' voice we heard... but it was taken from one of the spoken word pieces he had previously recorded, with his permission. Episode co-writer Tawny Newsome is friends with Lofton, executive producer Noga Landau explained to TVLine: "We knew that we wanted to ask if Cirroc would come back to play Jake. He said yes. And Cirroc is very, very close with Avery still, of course, and we knew that what we wanted was to leave this love letter for Avery Brooks, to say thank you for what you did."

They knew Brooks had retired from acting, but "along the journey of the episode, we realized that Avery had these beautiful spoken word pieces that he had recorded, and we thought, 'Wouldn't it be amazing if we could put one in the episode?' Because the one that's in the episode in a really serendipitous way is exactly the message of the episode. And he was very, very generous, and he said yes."

So even though Brooks hasn't acted on screen in more than two decades, he's still managing to be a part of the ongoing "Star Trek" legacy.