The movie scene that left Steven Seagal covered in monkey poop: “Everyone’s a critic”
If ever there was a moment that captured the essence of an actor, it’s Steven Seagal trying his hardest to convey human emotion in front of a cast and crew, only to end up being showered in shit for his troubles.
The martial artist and action star has always been his own biggest fan, even if his dramatic capabilities could very generously be described as modest. He couldn’t act, and while his signature style of using aikido to reduce small armies of interchangeable goons to mincemeat brought some success for a while, it was fleeting.
Undeterred, Seagal continued churning out dozens upon dozens of woeful movies for decades to come, and it takes either the most dedicated fan or an absolute glutton for self-punishment to have seen them all. He’s also, by all accounts, a bit of a dick: the list of former colleagues who hold him in the lowest esteem is a very long one, and if that many people don’t have anything nice to say, then he must not be a very nice man.
Fond of telling tall tales and exaggerating his achievements, even as Seagal’s martial arts prowess began to wane with the inescapable passage of time, he continued to maintain his hard-man image onscreen. He was barely mobile, and it was clear the stunt doubles were doing almost all of the work, but that didn’t deter him from carrying on, diversifying into directing and screenwriting, and even carrying ludicrous airs of grandeur that he was the second coming of Akira Kurosawa.
It was apparent from the very beginning that Seagal would always be known as an actor of minimal ability, even if his feature debut in 1988’s Above the Law turned enough of a profit to indicate there was an audience for his distinct brand of ponytailed ass-kicking.
Seeking to strike while the iron was hot, the leading man dived right into his second outing as a leading man in Bruce Malmuth’s Hard to Kill, where he played the wonderfully named Mason Storm. The Shawshank Redemption and Die Hard 2‘s William Sadler was on villainous duties as a corrupt United States senator, and he revealed that even as early as his sophomore film, the animal kingdom had already sussed Seagal out.
“There’s a scene where we’re shooting at the zoo,” he recalled. “We’re in front of the ape enclosure. There’s a moat, and then there’s this cliff, and all these apes, all these chimps, are sitting there watching us film.” It all sounds fairly innocuous until Seagal’s performance in the scene stunk out the joint in more ways than one.
“Halfway through the scene, behind us are these apes, and in the middle of the take, I heard the cameraman yell, ‘Incoming,'” Sadler continued. “The apes had apparently all crapped in their hands and thrown it. It was raining monkey shit. I thought, ‘Wow, everyone’s a critic.'”
It wouldn’t be the first time SDeagal had taken a serious commendation on his work, but rarely had it arrived with such perfumed velocity. But, while the audience in attendance was tough on the legendary tough guy, the ticket-buying audiences generally approved of the movie.
Hard to Kill was a huge hit at the box office after recouping its production budget almost seven times over, but little did the monkeys know that they’d set the tone for what was to come by deciding Seagal’s acting was only worthy of being drowned out by a cacophony of crap.
