Ben Affleck’s failed film with Christopher Walken: “They fired him and shut the movie down”
Before he penned the screenplay for Good Will Hunting, starred in Armageddon, or proved himself to be an Oscar-worthy director, Ben Affleck was just a kid from Boston who loved baseball and acting. When he became friends with a boy living a few blocks away named Matt Damon, who had a similar love of acting and attended the same school, Affleck started getting serious about his craft, pursuing auditions and landing bit parts in movies and TV shows. However, career success was slow to arrive, and Affleck found himself taking roles that were subpar at best.
One opportunity that seemed like it had the makings of a breakthrough came sometime in the late 1980s. “In high school, I got an agent,” he recalled in a past interview. “Matt [Damon] and I used to go to New York and audition for stuff.” After landing a TV movie with Forest Whitaker, he was offered the lead role in a feature film starring comic Sam Kinison.
“‘Crocodile Dundee’ had been a big movie, so this was a fish-out-of-water film,” Affleck explained. “[I]t was the story of an Eskimo who came to New York City and made special friends with a teenage kid, who was me, and we bonded. I was the son of a Donald Trump–type character, played by Christopher Walken. After two days of shooting, Kinison had gone so crazy, they fired him and shut the movie down. Sam was very coked up and unreasonable and demanded all these script changes, so they just stopped.”
At the time, Kinison was a big name on the stand-up comedy scene. A bombastic ex-preacher known for his misogynistic subject matter and the primal shriek that inflected the end of his sentences, he was killed in a car crash in 1992, leaving him to be remembered mainly as a comedian of a very specific era. His casting as a fish-out-of-water in the mould of Crocodile Dundee is undoubtedly intriguing. Still, it’s Christopher Walken as a Trump-like character that seems like the real missed opportunity with this unrealised film.
By the late ‘80s, Walken had already won an Oscar for the harrowing Vietnam War-era epic The Deer Hunter and was well on his way to becoming the unparalleled purveyor of bizarre magnetism and scene-stealing cameos. The offbeat Depression-era musical Pennies from Heaven had allowed him to show off all the dance training he had undertaken in his youth, tap dancing on the counter of a dingy bar to the tune of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave” while slowly removing his clothing.
In other words, by the time this Crocodile Dundee knockoff was in the works, Walken’s cards were well and truly on the table, and any director who hired him to play a Trumpian character knew what thrills might lie in store for future audiences.
Sadly, Affleck gave no insight into how Walken might have portrayed a property mogul. He did not even reveal how he felt about portraying the Oscar-winning actor’s on-screen son at such an early stage in his career. All we know is that, luckily, neither Affleck’s nor Walken’s careers were harmed by the film getting shelved.
