The “horrible” actor who accidentally made Robin Williams a star: “It was so bad”
Acting is as much a game of luck, chance, and opportunity as it is talent and skill, with Robin Williams being the main beneficiary of an actor stinking up a part so badly that they walked away from the job.
With his razor-sharp comedic timing, improvisational skills, and increasing popularity on the stand-up circuit, it was only a matter of time before Williams ended up swapping the stage for the screen anyway, because he was simply too talented for Hollywood to ignore.
He still needed to wedge his foot in the door, though, and the first time a massive mainstream audience got a taste of his particular brand of comedy came when he made his first appearance on Happy Days in the February 1978 episode ‘My Favourite Orkan’ during the show’s fifth season, which averaged over 31 million viewers every week.
The character was so popular that seven months later, the Williams-fronted spinoff Mork & Mindy premiered, and by the end of its first season, with an average weekly viewership of almost 29 million, it was the third most-watched show on American television. And to think, he wasn’t even the first guy hired for the role.
Dom DeLuise and Roger Rees both turned it down when the part was offered their way, with John Byner eventually agreeing to what Happy Days creator Garry Marshall called “a tentative deal to star in the series,” but at the last minute, Byner decided that “he didn’t want to play an alien on a television series” and dropped out, with the search forced to begin all over again.
That eventually led them to Williams, and after an audition that blew everyone away, he was hired as Mork. As Anson Williams, who played Potsie on the show, recalled, “Mork & Mindy was like the worst script in the history of Happy Days,” describing the teleplay as “unreadable; it was so bad”.
“So, they hire some guy for Mork; bad actor, bad part,” the actor elaborated on the first person hired to run through the script, which would have been Byner. “He was horrible!” Regardless of the quality of the script, Williams was a force of nature who showed throughout his career that he was capable of polishing a few turds, and if it hadn’t been for the last-minute dropout, the role wouldn’t have been his.
It was, and it proved so successful that he got his own show out of the deal, which ran for four seasons, turned him into one of the highest-paid performers on episodic television, won him a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actor – Television Series Musical or Comedy’, and opened the industry’s eyes to the increasingly undeniable fact that a brand-new superstar was in their midst.
As far as sliding doors moments go, it was a pretty big one, and if it hadn’t been for that “horrible” actor deciding that Mork wasn’t for them, who knows how, when, or where Williams path to superstardom would have started instead.
