Source: Lucy North – PA Images / Getty
Ghostbusters star Ernie Hudson joined the franchise for the first movie in 1984. Since then the Ghostbusters franchise has roared on to a total of five movies including the latest, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
What has amazed fans more than the special effects which have gotten more and more advanced as the years have gone on, is Hudson’s still youthful looks. The 78-year-old star has, according to fans, looked pretty much the same through the three decades the movies have been coming out.
“Ernie Hudson needs to be studied,” a fan posted on X.
Hudson, played Winston Zeddmore in four Ghostbusters films, and a new character, Uncle Bill, in the all-female Ghostbusters reboot in 2016. He was 38 when the original Ghostbusters was released in 1984.
USA Today pointed out in an article about fans who couldn’t believe that the star has aged so well, that fellow Hollywood celebrities Goldie Hawn, John Lithgow, Bette Midler, Helen Mirren, Tom Selleck, Henry Winkler and Steve Martin are also 78.
Hudson’s Ghostbusters co-star, Bill Murray is 73. Hudson says that he has a complicated relationship with the franchise, because during the first one, he wasn’t shown in the poster and the role was reduced in the movie after it was first offered to Eddie Murphy.
“Ghostbusters, I would say, it was probably the most difficult movie I ever did just from the psychological perspective,” the actor said on The Howard Stern Wrap Up Show in 2023. “All those things…It definitely felt deliberate. And I’m still not trying to take it personally.”
Hudson says that Murray supported his efforts to bring his compensation up for Ghostbusters II. Hudson says Murray said that he wouldn’t have done another film if they didn’t make it right for Hudson, who became a fan favorite after the first film.
But Hudson says that he won’t say it was racism that the studio didn’t initially support him in the role.
“Anything bad, 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,” he said. “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.”
