The deleted scene that left Laurence Fishburne dejected: “I was feeling really, really down”
Laurence Fishburne has been in more great films than you’ve had hot dinners.
From blockbuster franchises like The Matrix and Ant-Man to acclaimed dramas What’s Love Got to Do with It and Boyz n the Hood to cult hits like Event Horizon and King of New York, his face crops up all over the place, and it’s usually a sign of quality. Well, except for Megalopolis, where nobody knows what he or director Francis Ford Coppola was thinking there.
It’s easy to forget that the man formerly known as ‘Larry’ actually started his career with one of the most acclaimed films of all time, which saw him lying about his age to land a part on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, claiming he was 17 when he was actually just 14. Like many of his co-stars, he endured a hellacious filming schedule that made the movie one of the most infamous in production history. He even ended up saving Emilio Estevez’s life when he was on set visiting his father Martin Sheen. Funnily, the film took so long to complete that, by the time it was done, Fishburne was the age he had falsely claimed he was when it started.
However, Fishburne’s youth ended up working against him in a major way, and speaking as part of the documentary Number One on the Call Sheet: Black Leading Men in Hollywood, the star revealed that his lack of life experience resulted in an entire scene getting canned from the final cut of the movie.
“There’s a scene in Apocalypse Now that got cut from the original film, and then it’s been put back in the redux,” he said, elaborating, “I was 14, 15, whatever, trying to do this scene talking about sex, and I had no sexual experience. Like, none… [Coppola] couldn’t figure out how to get me to be any more experienced than I am, but he kept asking me to do it over and over again. I did something like 40 takes. It was really bad. And I could tell that he was disappointed. So I was feeling really, really down, really dejected.”
The character he was playing, Tyrone ‘Mr Clean’ Miller, was meant to be a brash, loud-mouthed teenager from the Bronx, precisely the sort of person who would brag about their sexual exploits, even if they didn’t have any. Unfortunately, Fishburne was just too young to even fake something like that, and this is why you need to properly vet your cast people.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom for the youngster on set as he got the chance to spend time with some of the finest actors to ever grace the Earth, including Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper. In the same documentary, he recalled Martin Sheen telling him how good an actor he was, which helped bolster his spirits. The film also began a lucrative working relationship with Coppola, for whom Fishburne acted many times, and it does include Megalopolis, so I hesitate to call this entirely positive.
The story of the making of Apocalypse Now is one of the most well-told and astounding in film lore, and while Fishburne’s experiences make up but a small part of the insane tale, it is undoubtedly a wild introduction to your movie career.
