The time a knife was pulled during an argument between Rip Torn and Dennis Hopper
There are few works of cinema that embody the spirit of the counterculture movement of the late 1960s quite like Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern’s 1969 independent road movie Easy Rider, which remains one of the most significant films of the decade, for the way it details alternative lifestyles of communes and drug use.
Easy Rider sees Hopper and Fonda play two bikers who travel from Los Angeles through the American southwest and south after smuggling and selling a stash of cocaine from Mexico. Jack Nicholson also featured in his breakout role and was nominated for an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, making the cinema legend known to the world for the first time.
Interestingly, Nicholson had not initially been cast in his breakout role. Instead, the Academy Award-nominated character actor Rip Torn, who would later come into the public’s attention with appearances in The Larry Sanders Show and Men in Black, was the first person to be offered the George Hanson part.
Terry Southern had actually written the role for Torn, who, by the mid-1960s, had a career comprised of respectable efforts in the theatre and the movies alike. However, Torn blew his shot at starring in Easy Rider when he was dining with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda at a New York restaurant.
A discussion at the dinner table suddenly turned into a heated argument, and a knife was pulled out, reportedly by Torn, who pointed it at Hopper. Torn himself remembered the event differently and claimed that it was Hopper who pulled out the weapon, but regardless, Torn no longer had his role in Easy Rider.
The part of George became available, and Jack Nicholson took it on with open arms, marking the beginning of his excellent career in the film industry. Torn’s career was greatly affected, and his reputation in showbusiness took several decades to repair itself. It was made worse when Hopper brought up the incident when appearing on The Tonight Show in 1994.
Torn retaliated by suing the actor and director for defamation, insisting once again that Hopper had pulled the knife. Regardless of who exactly pulled the knife on who will likely never be confirmed, it’s well known that both men are rather volatile in nature, so perhaps it was always a disaster waiting to happen.
Check out Jack Nicholson in the scene that might have featured Rip Torn were it not for a heated twist of fate.
