LSD, tequila, spaceships, and handcuffs: how Dennis Hopper wasted the biggest paycheque of his career
Hollywood has always been populated by addictive personalities, and there was really only one way things were going to go when Dennis Hopper was handed the biggest paycheque of his career and dispatched to Mexico, a place where drugs and alcohol weren’t very hard to come by in the 1980s.
Having been exiled from mainstream cinema for the second time after the disastrous production of The Last Movie, the actor and filmmaker dipped his toes into international waters. He jetted off to Australia to shoot Mad Dog Morgan in the mid-1970s, where he got up to all sorts of Dennis Hopper things, including getting so drunk he should have been legally dead.
He worked with Wim Wenders on The American Friend, which was shot on location in Germany and featured a predominantly international ensemble, pitched up in France for François Weyergans’ Flesh Color, stayed away from America for the French/Italian co-production, CIA contro KGB, and spent the duration of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Philippines.
In early 1983, a West German producer offered him a pay packet that was “more than he’d ever been offered” to board Ernst R von Theumer’s Jungle Warriors, where he’d play the head of the DEA in a supporting role that only required him to speak 17 lines. It was a lot of cash for not a lot of work, so Hopper packed his bags and set out for the Mexican city of Cuernavaca.
That’s when things went seriously awry. Upon arriving at his hotel room, he necked three shots of tequila, which he later claimed were laced with LSD, sending him on a trip. “I became convinced that there were people in the bowels of this place who were being tortured and cremated,” he recalled. “The people had come to save me, and they were being killed and tortured, and it was my fault.”
Naturally, he opted to escape his abode and into the night, which, as he remembered, wasn’t the best night of his life. “I masturbated in front of a tree and thought I’d become a galaxy,” he explained, and things got weirder from there, with Hopper feeling insects and snakes crawling underneath his skin, causing him to rip off his clothes and parade around the jungle while stark bollock naked.
How did he find his way around? “I was being guided by a spaceship that was controlling my mind,” obviously. As the morning arrived, he made his way back to Cuernavaca, but not without throwing rocks at oncoming traffic and being apprehended by the local authorities, who tried to put a robe on him. Of course, Hopper refused, because he was adamant that he wanted to die in the nude.
Unsurprisingly, he was fired from Jungle Warriors and replaced as the DEA chief by Marjoe Gortner, but his misery didn’t end there. When he arrived back in the United States, his friends convinced him to go to rehab, and when he did, the alcohol withdrawal symptoms caused severe hallucinations.
It began as the biggest payday of his career, but ended with Hopper being plied with so many medications that his body virtually froze. “It lasted for three months without them knowing what had happened,” he said. “I was in the lockup, cleaning toilets, and shaking so badly I screamed, ‘I can’t do it!’ And the guard said, ‘You’re going to do it!’ But I couldn’t hold the rag.”
