How Gary Busey became the unlikely lead in ‘The Buddy Holly Story’
At 81 years old, Gary Busey is a wholly unique American cartoon character of sorts.
Just last week, the actor who once starred alongside the likes of Barbara Streisand, Jodie Foster, and Patrick Swayze posted a video of himself honking madly like a flock of geese as a “special Christmas gift” to his fans. It wasn’t really out of step with a lot of Busey’s social media antics of recent years, which some people find amusing and endearing, but probably a tad more would describe as sad and concerning.
One thing’s for sure; the past two generations of humans who’ve shared this spinning blue globe with Gary Busey have largely missed out on what actually made the man a Hollywood star in the first place – the undeniable talent that was on display before a 1988 motorcycle accident and various subsequent health problems sent him spiralling through much of the second half of his life, unable to control his inner demons.
Don’t get it twisted, though. Busey was never not himself. Even in the early days of his acting career in the 1970s, he was known as something of a live wire, full of energy and enthusiasm and prone to rants and tangents. That limitless battery power came through in his performances, though, and made him jump off the screen in bit parts. It also endeared him to casting directors and producers, who appreciated how infectiously invested he often got in the stories the filmmakers were trying to tell.
This is ultimately how Gary Busey – the batty, slightly frightening old man in your Instagram feed – became an Oscar-nominated lead actor another lifetime ago.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Busey told the Dayton Journal Herald in 1978, shortly after earning his Academy Award nod for The Buddy Holly Story. “I don’t remember ‘me’ in [the film]. I know it sounds corny, but it’s like I was around it, observing it all, but not present. It was Buddy’s movie.”
Busey had grown up as a fan of Buddy Holly and had been trying for years to get involved in a film version of the rock legend’s life. One such project, called Three-Sided Coin, had already cast Busey as the drummer in Holly’s band the Crickets, largely because he’d played a similar role as the drummer in Streisand’s band in A Star is Born.
Disappointingly, Three-Sided Coin was shut down mid-production by 20th Century Fox due to disputes with Buddy Holly’s estate, but when a second attempt got underway at Columbia Pictures a short time later, the casting director Joyce Selznick remembered Busey and gave him a fresh audition for the lead role, despite the fact that he was already a decade older than Holly had ever been.
“At first they thought I was too fat,” Busey said, “but I had just dropped 40 pounds to do Big Wednesday. And their first priority was to do the music live, so they wanted someone who could sing. . . . The main thing was that I agreed with what the producers were doing,” he added. “They wanted to make a true, realistic movie about Holly and rock and roll, and so did I.”
Once he won the gig, Busey approached his portrayal of Holly with an incredible level of dedication, arguably setting the permanent standard for dozens of other actors in the rock biopic genre over the next 50 years. Along with rebuilding his body to more accurately match Holly’s svelte figure, he threw himself into the live performance demands of the film, playing guitar and singing in his own voice rather than lip-syncing.
“It’s the only way this movie could work,” Busey said. “We had to do it live to capture that spirit. I didn’t try to impersonate Holly, although you just can’t help picking up his mannerisms, you know, like the hiccups and the phrasing. I think it’s just because everyone does that subconsciously. He invented that style of singing.”
Jon Voigt ultimately won the Oscar that year over Busey for his performance in Coming Home, but The Buddy Holly Story has remained one of the most acclaimed music biopics of all time, with a 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes as of 2025. Ironically, it achieved that success largely due to Gary Busey – a man who has only played himself for the past 40 years – completely losing himself in the character.
“For a long time, he was Buddy,” said Busey’s wife at the time, Judy Helkenberg. “When we were in Buddy’s hometown for the premiere, Buddy’s widow told me she felt that Buddy’s spirit was in Gary’s body. Even she felt it.”
