Legendary actor Ernie Hudson has joined the reboot of the beloved sci-fi drama Quantum Leap. Deadline reports that Hudson will star opposite Raymond Lee in the pilot episode of the potential new series, which is a sequel to the original. The Quantum Leap revival picks up 30 years after Scott Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett first stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and disappeared.
Now, world-renowned physicist Dr. Ben Seong (Lee), has found himself in a similar situation while working with a new team on the Quantum Leap time-travel project. Seong is transported back to the 1980s, where he meets Herbert “Magic” Williams (Hudson), a Vietnam veteran who is the head of the Quantum Leap project in that time. Magic is able to buy Seong’s team a little bit of time to rescue the brilliant doctor — by “using a bit of politicking and his military know-how to keep the Pentagon at bay” — but he expects a lot of answers once the situation is resolved.
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Hudson is most well-known for playing Winston Zeddemore in the original Ghostbusters films, a role he recently reprised in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a sequel to Ghostbusters II. Speaking exclusively to PopCulture.com ahead of the film’s release, Hudson shared what it was like to reunite with former co-stars Bill Murray, Dan Akyroyd, Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts for the new movie. “For me to be able to suit up with Danny, and Bill, it was actually spiritual,” he said.
Hudson added, “I didn’t realize how much this movie has impacted my life over the past 35 years and this is something, it’s very specific, and these are people that I share that with specifically. We did this thing together and I would run into Danny, or Sigourney, or Annie at different events from time to time. But for us all to be together, it was just very touching.”
The iconic actor went on to explain that he and his fellow had kept in touch over the years, but there was something very special about being together on-set. “It just felt like, ‘Wow, can you believe here we are, in one location?’ And that was… just very weird,” he said. “Because it’s sort of like family, getting together with your brothers. The time you have is being on the set, but also going out together, and just to be together in a location was really great.”
