The movie that finally sent Steven Seagal into Hollywood exile: “He’s not a good guy”
There’s nothing that stops bad actors who make nothing but bad movies from enjoying long and successful careers in Hollywood, but there’s always going to be a breaking point, even if it took mainstream cinema far too long to reach the end of its tether with Steven Seagal.
For one thing, he couldn’t emote his way out of a paper bag. For another, for all intents and purposes, he’s an arsehole. Hitting the trifecta of being crap at his job, making exclusively awful films, Under Siege being the exception, and spending his time on set burning bridges and making enemies, it was only a matter of time before he was cast out onto his arse and left on the outside looking in.
He rose to prominence in a time when the action genre was at its meatiest iteration of meat and potatoes. All anyone needed to become a leading man was either rippling biceps, rock-hard abs, or martial arts expertise, and since he questionably scraped by on the latter, Seagal became a star by frowning his way through a string of flicks where he barrelled through a raft of faceless goons.
It worked, for a while, before the box office returns started not so much dropping but falling off a cliff. He desperately needed 2001’s Exit Wounds, which recouped its budget more than twice over to give him his first hit in years, only for his next big-screen outing to become a cause for celebration when it marked the point of no return.
Written and directed by Don Michael Paul in his feature-length debut, 2002’s Half Past Dead is typical Seagal stuff, with the actor’s FBI agent going undercover as a hardened criminal. He punches people, shoots people, and constantly looks like he’s trying to hold in a robust fart whenever he’s required to speak words and pass himself off as a human being, pretty run-of-the-mill fare.
After it flopped and became one of his worst-reviewed movies, which is impressive, considering how many of them were competing for the title, Hollywood decided he was yesterday’s news. It would be another eight years, and more than 20 films, before Seagal was spotted in a wide theatrical release, which came when he wielded a sword against Danny Trejo in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete.
According to Paul, the leading man was up to his usual tricks during Half Past Dead‘s production. “Steven Seagal, to be honest, was not good to work with,” he said, shockingly. “He’s just not very good to people, and he doesn’t show up to work. So most of the time, I was shooting with stunt doubles and body doubles. Sorry if that disappoints you, but he’s not a good guy. Having worked with him once, I would not do it again under any circumstances.”
In the two decades since Half Past Dead, apart from his glorified cameo in Machete, Seagal hasn’t appeared in a single movie that’s been screened in more than a handful of theatres. The Expendables seemed tailor-made for someone like him, but because he claimed he “didn’t like some of the people involved,” even that failed to materialise.
