John Wayne on the greatest acting advice he ever received: “Why don’t you wise up?”
Throughout Hollywood history, many stars have reached the top of the mountain by playing slight variations on one main type of character. For example, Dwayne Johnson tends to play Dwayne Johnson in different situations, while Vin Diesel could never really be accused of exhibiting range. However, if you’re so good at one thing that the entire moviegoing audience will pay money to see you do it, why would you veer from that path? This is the very dilemma that John Wayne – arguably the greatest ever one-note star in history – faced in the early days of his career. Luckily, someone set him straight by giving him the greatest piece of acting advice he ever heard.
By the time Wayne appeared in 1941’s The Shepherd of the Hills, he had already been acting for 15 years. The first four years of his nascent career featured little more than uncredited extra roles, but then he landed his first starring part in 1930’s The Big Trail. Unfortunately, Fox cancelled Wayne’s contract after only three pictures as a lead. It took nearly a decade of working his way back to prominence before he struck gold in 1939’s Stagecoach. Suddenly, Wayne was a huge western star, and ‘The Duke’ became a household name.
On the set of Shepherd, though, Wayne was experiencing his first real stirrings of artistic ambition. The film was his first in Technicolour, and he was stepping outside of his usual lane for the role. Instead of playing a cowboy, a soldier, or some other kind of tough guy, he was playing a moonshiner in the Ozark mountains who hates his father and has a serious distrust of a mysterious stranger who comes to his community preaching forgiveness.
Six months before he died in 1979, Wayne gave his last interview to Barbara Walters and spoke of his experience making Shepherd. He revealed, “I remember when I was a young man, and we were making a picture in which Harry Carey was playing my father.” Wayne was excited by the prospect of this role opening him up to a huge variety of characters, and he told Carey and the other actors about his ambitions. He mused, “I was imbued with the idea that I wanted to play every kind of part.”
Carey’s wife Ali was in earshot of Wayne when he was waxing lyrical about the endless possibilities of acting, though. When the rest of the cast dispersed, she told Wayne, “You’re a big jerk.” Well, in reality, that was the clean version of what she said. Wayne chuckled, “She didn’t say jerk because it was the language of a truck driver.”
Wayne was taken aback, unaware of what he’d said to annoy Ali so much. He asked, “What’s the matter?” and in response, she put her hand on her husband’s arm and asked Wayne, “Would you like to see Harry Carey different?” Her husband was one of the biggest stars of the silent film era, you see, and was synonymous with western heroes. Naturally, Wayne responded, “No, of course not” – and this set Ali up to deliver the advice that would shape Wayne’s entire career.
Ali told the young star, “Well, why don’t you wise up? The American people have taken you to their hearts and they expect a certain thing out of you. Don’t disappoint them.”
Suddenly, Wayne’s thoughts of expanding his acting horizons into many unique, artistically fulfilling, and potentially risky roles seemed ridiculous. As Ali so forcefully put it, moviegoers had accepted Wayne as a take-no-prisoners hero, and that was what they paid their hard-earned dollars to see. He could play cowboys and soldiers—and maybe that was all he was supposed to play.
Ultimately, Wayne applied that advice to his career with little variation for the better part of the next four decades, and it served him very well. No wonder he smiled and told Walters, “I think that’s the best advice I was given in my life”.
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