The one role Patrick Swayze said he would “kill” to play: “I basically had to beg”
It isn’t recommended for an actor to murder their competition to improve their chances of winning a role, but Patrick Swayze was ready to do it when he found out that he wasn’t the first choice for a part he desperately wanted to play.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, though, and the feather-haired Dirty Dancing favourite was merely considering all of his options. As chance, or perhaps fate, would have it, so many names turned down the job that he ended up getting it anyway, without having to take another life.
Sometimes, an actor will read a script and know that they’re the best choice. Well, every actor probably feels that way every time they read any script, because you’re not going to get very far in Hollywood if you don’t believe in yourself. Still, Swayze was eventually proven completely correct.
When the casting search began, Bruce Joel Rubin’s screenplay for the supernatural romance, Ghost, was offered to the usual suspects. Bruce Willis knocked it back and later admitted that he was a “knucklehead” for not being interested in starring opposite his then-wife, Demi Moore, as Sam Wheat.
Eddie Murphy wished that Paramount had come to him first, since he was the studio’s biggest draw, but he wasn’t on the list. Harrison Ford was, though, and he also said no. So did Michael J Fox, and much like Willis, he admitted to the film’s Academy Award-winning star, Whoopi Goldberg, that he wished he hadn’t.
By the process of elimination, then, Swayze’s chances had dramatically improved before he’d even auditioned. And yet, there was one more hurdle in front of him. “When I read this script, I went crazy for it,” he told Chuck Davis. “I said, ‘I’d kill for this role’. I have to do this role.”
“I heard they were talking to Kevin Kline,” he explained. “But I didn’t feel they needed that over-the-top humour. I basically had to beg. Jerry Zucker was quoted as saying, ‘Over my dead body will Patrick Swayze…’ I basically said, ‘I will come in. I will do anything he wants me to do. I will become putty in his hands’. I went in there, and when I was done, they were all crying, and they said, ‘You got the role.'”
His determination paid off, with Ghost providing arguably the most iconic role of his career, unless you’re a Dirty Dancing or Road House obsessive, first and foremost. It was also the highest-grossing release of 1990, the third top-earning movie of all time, and it would never be dislodged as the single biggest hit of Swayze’s entire career.
That’s not bad going for someone who was at least fourth choice for the part, if not lower, and he didn’t even have to kill anyone to get it. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he added. “I didn’t expect it to be. There’s nothing to play with.” After turning himself into putty in Zucker’s hands, or wet clay to be more accurate, Swayze proved himself as the best man for the job, and secured one of his career-defining characters in the process.
