“I got fired”: Dennis Hopper, cinema’s ultimate hell-raiser, only got axed once
When Dennis Hopper began acting in the late 1950s, he quickly asserted himself as the ultimate Hollywood daredevil, doing things that no actor would get away with these days.
Times have drastically changed, and I doubt a star known for taking as many drugs, playing Russian roulette, snorting ashes, wandering naked in the jungle and shooting trees he mistook for bears would retain the legacy that Hopper has all these years later. He was a symbol of a bygone era of radical experimentation, both spiritually and creatively. The actor’s interest in the 1960s’ penchant for free love, getting high, and rebelling against convention came to define his career, which truly kicked off when he starred in and directed Easy Rider.
As a reflection of the decade’s cry for freedom and severance of the old, post-war way, the film was ultimately nihilistic and tragic, but Hopper was lauded for both his performance and the film itself, which he somehow managed to craft while being permanently under the influence of some drug or another.
He clearly had it in him to work while indulging in his daring and reckless lifestyle, and while he took a break from cinema in the 1970s following a dispute regarding his film The Last Movie, he never actually found himself on the receiving end of being fired until the 1990s, when he was totally sober.
The role was actually a big one, and he extensively prepared for it, but he was fired because it was ultimately decided that he was wrong for the part. Hopper could’ve been Christof in The Truman Show, a role that instead went to Ed Harris and won him a Golden Globe.
He told Index Magazine, “Yeah, it was terrific, with a part I got fired from. Now, do you think that historians will know that in The Truman Show, with Jim Carrey, that the part Ed Harris played, and we’re happy that he won the award for, that I was fired from after shooting one day?”
Hollywood is loaded with stories of actors getting fired and being replaced, and it’s interesting to consider what could’ve been if Hopper played the part instead. It’s just part and parcel of the industry, but it certainly left the actor feeling a little downtrodden, because he had poured several months of preparation into it.
“I went down and saw [director] Peter Weir twice in Florida,” he said, and yet, it was a producer who was responsible for Hopper being kicked off the production, as he explained, “I spent six months on that picture, and then did one day shooting, and Scott Rudin, the producer, who I’d never even met, he never wanted me for the part. He said he would wait for one day’s rushes, and if he didn’t want me in the picture, he was going to fire me, and he did. Anyway, that’s my story. But I enjoyed the picture, and I thought Ed was really good in it. I think he’s a terrific actor.”
So that was that. Hopper, a legendary, Oscar-winning star, was booted off the set of a great film just because a producer got to make a final decision, marking it admittedly the first and only time in his life that he was fired from a project.
