The movie Henry Fonda was “shamed” into making: “That’s like playing God, to me”
In his early career, Henry Fonda rose to fame thanks to movies like Jezebel and Jesse James, before he broke out as a superstar with his Oscar-nominated performance in The Grapes of Wrath. The year before Grapes, though, he made a film that initially terrified him, as he couldn’t imagine himself playing an iconic figure from American history.
In truth, when Fonda was approached about playing arguably the most well-known American President in history, Abraham Lincoln, in 1939’s Young Mr Lincoln, he was only a few years into his film career. In those days, actors worked constantly, so he had already starred in an eye-watering 18 pictures in less than four years before signing up to play Honest Abe. However, he still considered himself too young and inexperienced at only 34 to take on such a seminal role.
“When it was first suggested to me, I just said, ‘You’re crazy. You know I can’t play Lincoln,'” Fonda explained during a 1975 BBC interview. “‘That’s like playing God to me.'”
Producer Darryl F. Zanuck and studio 20th Century Fox wouldn’t take no for an answer, though, and after some light metaphorical arm-twisting, they finally persuaded Fonda to do a screen test. He sat in a make-up chair for three long hours as the artists coiffed his hair, affixed a prosthetic nose, and added a wart to his face to make him look as much like a young Lincoln as possible.
The next day, he arrived at the studio to watch the screen test, and to his astonishment, the likeness tricked his brain for a moment. “I thought, ‘My God, that’s it. It does look like Lincoln,'” Fonda recalled. However, what happened next completely destroyed any confidence he had in being able to play the part. “Then my voice came out, and it just destroyed me,” he admitted, horrified at hearing the pitch and tone of his own voice emanating from Lincoln’s visage. “I said, ‘No way.'”
Three long months passed following that screen test. By that point, Fox had hired legendary director John Ford to make the picture, which told the story of Lincoln as an idealistic young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, defending two brothers wrongfully accused of murder. The script was loosely based on the real-life case of William ‘Duff’ Armstrong, who was acquitted of murder in 1858 when Lincoln, three years before he became President, proved the main witness in the case was lying.
At this point, Ford had been one of Hollywood’s most respected (and feared) directors for over two decades, and everyone in the industry knew him as the ‘Old Man’ or ‘Pappy’. Imagine Fonda’s nervousness when he was called for a meeting with Ford in his office. He described trudging to that meeting like “a white hat sailor going in to see the admiral”, and when he arrived, proverbial hat in hand, Ford simply sucked on his pipe in silence and let Fonda stew for a few minutes.
Then, he finally looked up and challenged the young star about being too afraid to play Lincoln. “What are you thinking – he’s the Great Emancipator?!” Ford scoffed, ruthlessly pinpointing the historical legendary status that had undoubtedly stopped Fonda in his tracks. With his customary bluntness, Ford then pointed out that the version of Lincoln in their movie wouldn’t be the icon he became, but “only a young Jackleg lawyer from Springfield, for Christ’s sake!”
“Anyway, he shamed me into it,” Fonda revealed with a grin, before admitting Ford had hit the nail on the head regarding his reservations about the role. In short, he was intimidated, but Ford knew he didn’t need to be. “It’s perfectly true that I was thinking about the ‘Great Emancipator,” Fonda confessed, “but this was the young man in his first law case.”
