“I lost out on millions!”: John Leguizamo and the “stupid reason” he cost himself a fortune in 2006
With over 100 movie credits to his name, we all know John Leguizamo from somewhere different.
Older fans might remember him from early appearances in Carlito’s Way and the ill-fated Super Mario Bros. Viewers with shorter memories will recall his performances in The Menu and John Wick: Chapter 2. If you were a schoolchild in the 2010s like me, then you probably know him as Tybalt in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, as you were forced to watch him kill Mercutio dozens of times in preparation for your exams. However, if you’re after his most profitable work, then you have to head to the realm of animation.
In 2002, the Colombian-born star lent his voice to Sid the Sloth in Blue Sky Studios’ Ice Age. Alongside a woolly mammoth, voiced by Ray Romano, and a sabre-toothed tiger, voiced byDenis Leary, Sid must guide a weird-looking human baby (3D animation was still a bit wonky at this point) back to its own kind. The film was phenomenally successful, earning over $383million worldwide, but for Leguizamo, this success came at a price.
In an interview with The Independent, Leguizamo revealed that he had been offered the role of Ramón, a penguin in the 2006 animated kids’ film Happy Feet, but he had just agreed to do the first Ice Age sequel and was afraid of being typecast. In his own words, he didn’t “want to be doing all these ice movies”, but when the film made $384million at the box office, he realised he’d made a mistake.
“Such a stupid reason,” he lamented, “It seemed logical to me at the moment, and then I lost out on millions!”
Happy Feet, which was weirdly directed by Mad Max head honcho George Miller, centres on a young emperor penguin named Mumble, voiced by Elijah Wood, who finds that in a penguin society where singing is a vital skill, he has a talent for dancing instead and can only screech with his vocal cords.
There’s also a plot about overfishing and climate change, which sounds like it would clash with the dancing flightless fluffballs, and it does, but Ramón, the character earmarked for Leguizamo, was an Adélie penguin who befriends Mumble, and hence is quite a significant part of the plot.
He ended up being voiced by Robin Williams, who put on a vaguely Hispanic accent to bring the little guy to life, and this is one of the reasons why I think Leguizamo made the right choice, being a fierce advocate for Latino representation in cinema and having spoken out before about feeling humiliated by playing characters he felt gave his people a bad image. Ramón would have been one of those roles, especially the way Williams does it, and also, if you want to talk money, then Ice Age has been far more successful than Happy Feet. The penguin movie only got one sequel, while the sloth vehicle got four, with a fifth on the way in 2027.
With the power of hindsight, we can see that Leguizamo didn’t miss too much by turning down Happy Feet, but when those box office numbers initially rolled in, he must have felt like a right chump.
