The iconic movie that “annoyed” John Wayne because he wasn’t in it: “I desperately wanted that part”
Most of the time, if John Wayne really wanted to play a certain part in a certain movie, then he’d end up playing that part in that movie, because he was John Wayne, and few would say no to ‘The Duke’.
There were plenty of iconic roles that he turned down, with the legendary actor being given first dibs on plum gigs in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, and Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men.
The only one he actively regretted rejecting was Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, though, which affected him even more because the iconic antihero was ultimately brought to indelible life by Clint Eastwood, the pretender Wayne always viewed as his main threat as the biggest star in the western genre.
However, there were some parts that ‘The Duke’ lobbied for that he didn’t get, and one of them left him severely irritated because when he saw the finished film for himself, he accused the person who got it instead of him of giving a terrible performance, not that he laid the blame squarely at their feet.
Instead, a couple of years after it had been released, he found himself working with the classic adventure picture’s director, and after coming to the conclusion that he didn’t like them and their reputation as one of their generation’s foremost auteurs was a crock of shit, he forgave the offending thespian.
“I had, for a number of years, blamed Gregory Peck, an otherwise excellent actor, for his bad performance as Ahab in Moby Dick,” Wayne recalled. “I had desperately wanted that part, and was annoyed with Peck’s portrayal.” The 1956 blockbuster, which arguably remains the definitive big-screen adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel, was helmed by John Huston, who had two Academy Awards to his name.
Two years later, he directed Wayne in The Barbarian and the Geisha, and they did not get along. Huston admitted he’d made a mistake in hiring the gunslinger for his period-set romantic drama, while the leading man ended up despising the storied filmmaker with every fibre of his being.
Initially, he believed that Peck was simply having an off-day in Moby Dick, but during his time spent with Huston on their film, he suspected there was another reason. “I remembered this, sitting on my horse waiting for the cameras to roll, and realised what kind of picture and performance this was going to be,” he pondered. “Probably worse than Peck’s as Ahab.”
“The director of Moby Dick was John Huston, and I finally realised Peck didn’t have a chance,” he concluded. “Nor, for that matter, did I.” Was it Peck’s best work? No. Did he do the job? Yes. Is it still a classic ‘Golden Age’ epic that’s earned iconic status? Absolutely. Was ‘The Duke’ just being a little salty that he was passed over? Perhaps. That, and the fact he loathed Huston.
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