The actor who kept stealing Robin Williams’ dream roles: “No one thinks of me”
As one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and a performer with such a distinctive, unique, and inimitable style, Robin Williams was accustomed to scripts being written specifically for him to star, or existing screenplays being reworked to suit his sensibilities once he’d signed on the dotted line.
That only applied to his comedic vehicles, though, since he was no slouch in the dramatic department. While his more serious roles featured flashes of his comedic brilliance, Williams was more than capable of playing it completely straight and banishing any improvisation from his work.
The World According to Garp director George Roy Hill wouldn’t let him go off-script, and he didn’t see the need to when he worked with Christopher Nolan on Insomnia. The latter was part of a run of films the Academy Award-winning icon called his ‘Triptych of Evil’, but he had to wait a long time to get the chance.
Until the turn of the millennium, which Nolan’s remake bookended after Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo and Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy, the only time Williams had been allowed to embrace his dark side on the silver screen came in 1996, when he went uncredited in Christopher Hampton’s thriller, The Secret Agent, and it was an opportunity he’d already been waiting on for years.
The actor’s early ’90s were defined by the ‘one for me, one for them’ mentality that would dominate the rest of his career. He leaned into his tried and trusted persona in films like Hook, Aladdin, Toys, and Mrs Doubtfire, but found the time to flex his performative muscles in The Fisher King and Awakenings.
Still, he was growing tired of playing mugging protagonists, quip-happy characters, and one-note man-children. Unfortunately, whenever he tried to find a project that was the complete opposite, another name was always in front of him on the list. “I want to play something nasty,” he told The Independent in 1994. “But no one thinks of me when they want a psychotic guy; Chris Walken gets all those scripts.”
To be fair, few do psychotic better than Walken. That said, even he’s acknowledged that being sent so many scripts asking him to play some form of crazy guy started to get under his skin. Those were the kinds of roles that Williams was desperate to play, but since he’d been so successful doing almost the exact opposite, nobody was willing to take the risk.
“If worst comes to worst, I’ll go back on the road and be a stand-up comic, that’s got me through the bad periods before,” he added. “Part therapy, but also, you know, cash. To wait for a role that isn’t necessarily the sweet, likeable guy, that’s a hard call sometimes. They’ll always offer lots of money for certain things, but you can get creamed that way.”
Williams was so determined to be given a meatier role to sink his teeth into that he contemplated taking a hiatus from Hollywood. Obviously, he didn’t, and he had to wait another half-decade before he was presented the chance he’d always wanted. When he was, he knocked it out of the park, suggesting that it should have happened a long time before One Hour Photo.
