The genre Patrick Swayze tried to avoid like the plague: “I’ll never get out”
In the eyes of many, Patrick Swayze will always be Johnny Castle, the brash, hot-blooded, impossibly handsome dance instructor from Dirty Dancing, a role that established the actor as a mainstream figure, with his chemistry with Jennifer Grey, snake-like hips, and that iconic lift, making him an unbeatable hero.
Two years after Swayze launched a thousand puberties in Dirty Dancing, he put hair on the chests of an entirely new fanbase with Road House. As the no-nonsense doorman, James Dalton, he kicked his way into action movie history with this highly macho fight-a-thon, which didn’t make much of a splash at the time, but now it’s an absolutely must-watch for any action fan.
With his chiselled good looks, gruff demeanour, and threatening aura, Swayze could have used Road House to launch a career as an action star; instead, he wanted the exact opposite, which he explained to The Oklahoman as seeing this outing as a one-and-done.
“If I ever want to be taken seriously as an actor, I’ve done my action movie,” he said, “If I keep going down that street, I’m going to be pigeon-holed, and I’ll never get out. So that’s the reason I feel really excited about the combination of movies I’ve put together recently, with Road House and then Next of Kin, which is much more of a performance film. And then we’re negotiating for me to do Ghosts, which is very much of a romantic comedy. A lot of physical comedy.”
“Ghosts”, as Swayze called it, would eventually lose its last letter to become Ghost, which was released in 1990 and, sure enough, was a massive hit. It went on to become the third-highest-grossing movie of all time for a while and re-established Swayze as a romantic icon.
As for Next of Kin, the film he made directly after Road House, was an action thriller in which he played a small-town lawman who moves to Chicago to become a policeman. It’s got some shared DNA with its immediate predecessor, but is much more character-focused, and if Swayze was looking to diversify his portfolio, then that’s precisely what he did.
The action genre often gets the short end of the critical stick, deemed easy to dismiss films that essentially boil down to ‘man shoots other man’, and pointless fodder, but even the staunchest of sceptics (me) have to admit they have their place.
Even Swayze thought so, once saying that he was “built” to be an action star and even went back on his word of not returning to the scene, and in 1991, two years after Road House, starred in the homoerotic surfing masterpiece Point Break, another highlight of the action canon.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Swayze really did have his cake and eat it too. He got to have fun making stupid action flicks, but still flexed his more sensitive side in other projects, and crucially, he also missed out on starring alongside Conor McGregor in the god-awful modern remake.
