“It’s like I’m looking at somebody’s asshole”: the actor Terry Gilliam said had a rectal mouth
Being outspoken is part of who Terry Gilliam is, with the actor, comedian, and filmmaker happy to call it the way he sees it regardless of how many bridges he could potentially end up burning along the way.
If anything, it’s remarkable that the Monty Python veteran has continued to make movies for as long as he has, when he’s repeatedly become embroiled in studio politics and high-profile disagreements with powerful figures. Gilliam never backs down, and he’s ended up making a few enemies as a result.
Not that he’s ever been a particularly commercial director, but when he has waded into the notoriously choppy waters of expensive fare, things haven’t always gone off without a hitch. The Brothers Grimm is the costliest production he’s ever been a part of, and it was a nightmare every step of the way.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was another film with plenty of moving parts that caused much consternation on either side of the camera, although there’s a degree of irony to be found in a high-concept sci-fi packing a pair of A-list superstars becoming the biggest hit of Gilliam’s entire career.
It helped that it was an excellent, atmospheric, and intense existential fable, but a major reason why 12 Monkeys earned $168million at the box office to handily defeat all of Gilliam’s other features in terms of ticket sales was its ability to slap Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis all over the marketing materials.
In typical Gilliam style, though, he wasn’t interested in having a name. In fact, the name he ended up settling on appealed to him so little that he actively compared their face to an anus. “The pressure was to get a movie star in,” he said to Inverse. “That was at a time when I was still a hot director, so people wanted to come near me and touch me. So they were coming up with all these names. And I just kept saying no. Tom Cruise, Nic Cage, they were all being thrown at me.”
When the Die Hard frontman and action icon was suggested, Gilliam struggled to reconcile with his arse-like appendages. “I had never been a great fan of Bruce’s before, but I liked talking to him, and I thought, ‘OK, this guy’s smart; he’s funny,'” he offered. “I explained to him my concerns about him as an actor. I hated the Trumpian mouth he does in films. Rectal. It’s like I’m looking at somebody’s asshole.”
Once he’d overcome that highly specific bugbear with Willis’ mouth, he was happy to cast him as James Cole. The star has no doubt been called plenty of things by plenty of people during a decades-long career, but it’s highly unlikely that anyone else made a point of calling attention to his so-called “rectal” mouth.
