The Kurt Russell movie Disney banned Willem Dafoe from starring in: “He would have been phenomenal”
Even though it’s been proven on countless occasions across decades that adding Willem Dafoe to any ensemble or movie makes it better by default, Disney simply wasn’t having it.
As you’d expect, Kurt Russell was excited at the prospect of sharing the screen with one of modern cinema’s most reliable and chameleonic character actors, only for the people above his pay grade to effectively tell him to fuck off, because there was no way they’d let him star in the picture.
He might have been a ‘Mouse House’ regular back in the day, and he’ll forever be intertwined with Walt Disney after one of the media mogul’s final acts before he passed away was to write ‘Kurt Russell’ on a piece of paper, but it was clear that his goodwill with the top brass had run out by the early 1990s.
To add insult to injury, the lack of Dafoe wasn’t the only thing getting under the actor’s skin, with that sneaky bugger Kevin Costner also getting up to some behind-the-scenes shenanigans to try and cut Russell’s Tombstone off at the knees to position his Wyatt Earp as the must-see western of 1993.
The war of attrition between Costner’s film and Tombstone has been well-documented, and while Russell eventually came out on top after the movie that he claimed he didn’t ghost-direct, but everybody else said he did, earned more money at the box office, and was just superior in every other way.
Val Kilmer delivered one of his best-ever performances as Doc Holliday in the cult favourite oater, but he wasn’t the first name on the wish list. “Willem Dafoe was going to do the movie. Doc Holliday,” Russell told True West. “But Disney wouldn’t release the picture with Willem Dafoe, with him playing Doc Holliday.”
It was Disney or bust, since Costner had done his best to sabotage Tombstone at every turn. “Costner had shut down all avenues of release for the picture, except for Disney, except for Buena Vista,” he explained. Why? “He was able to,” Russell admitted. “He was powerful enough at the time, which I always respected.”
The Dances with Wolves Oscar-botherer had backed Tombstone into a corner; the Disney subsidiary, Buena Vista, was the only major outfit in Hollywood that was willing to green-light the production, but that would only happen if Dafoe was excised from the best part in the whole thing, a decision Russell agreed to, albeit with one or two regrets.
“He would have been phenomenal,” John Carpenter’s muse sighed. “But they came back, told Kevin Jarre: ‘Nope, you can go with Val Kilmer, but not Dafoe.'” Just like that, the latter was out on his arse, and the former was given the platform to do some of his finest work, although it’s not hard to imagine Dafoe doing an excellent job with Tombstone‘s Doc Holliday, either.
