The director who was “convinced” Dennis Hopper would die on their movie: “I’d found him drinking aftershave”
Any director brave enough to hire Dennis Hopper at the height of his drug-fuelled years would have known exactly what they were getting themselves into, and it still wasn’t enough to make them feel confident that the actor would still be alive by the end of production.
It shouldn’t have been their burden to carry, with Hopper responsible for his own actions and deciding that taking a ludicrous amount of drugs and drinking a mind-boggling amount of alcohol was the way he wanted to live his life, but there was still a professional duty of care to ensure he emerged unscathed.
Or as unscathed as 1970s-era Dennis Hopper could be, a period when he was blowing himself up with dynamite, snorting cocaine in the middle of federal sting operations, and gradually eroding all of the goodwill he’d built up after Easy Rider by becoming an increasingly self-destructive presence.
Having been effectively exiled from Hollywood for a second time, the star opted to take his talents across the globe, signing on for a number of international films. One of them was Phillipe Mora’s semi-biographical Australian picture, Mad Dog Morgan. He didn’t know which Hopper he was getting, but it didn’t take him too long to figure it out.
“Dennis arrived in Australia, and he was arrested almost immediately over some sort of incident in a bar,” Mora recalled. He was dialled in when the cameras were rolling, but when they weren’t, he was up to his usual tricks. Hopper was completely and utterly terrified of his co-star, Frank Thring, for some reason, which the director suspected had something to do with his extracurricular activities.
“Inflamed by Stanislavski, rum, beer, and psychedelics, Hopper hid in fear whenever Thring arrived,” Mora said. When he’d run out of his preferred libations and narcotics, he resorted to desperate measures, with the filmmaker walking into his hotel, where he’d “entered Hopper’s room and found him drinking Old Spice aftershave with the ultra-gonzo end of the crew.”
“Not having seen anyone consume this amount of alcohol and assorted drugs, I convinced myself that Hopper would die before completion and shipwreck my career,” Mora explained. “Weeks later, I was exhausted, Hopper was healthy, and I was saying goodbye with monumental sincerity.” The film was finished, and the leading man was still alive, but he couldn’t leave without another incident.
Having spent most, if not all, of his free time on Mad Dog Morgan getting off his tits, either by himself or with the aftershave-swigging crew members, Hopper opted to celebrate the last day of shooting in the most Dennis Hopper fashion possible, by vanishing from the set in full costume and getting absolutely shitfaced while dressed as a 19th-century outlaw.
In fact, he got so shitfaced that he was arrested again, and when he was subjected to a toxicology test, it was discovered that the actor had so much alcohol in his system that he should have been declared legally dead. To tie a final bow around Hopper’s adventures in Australia, he was also deported.
