The only role Gene Wilder regretted never playing: “I don’t want any comedians”
According to the late, great Gene Wilder, his status as one of Hollywood’s most brilliant comic actors was, by and large, a godsend for his career.
However, that isn’t to say it was all plain sailing for the star, especially when he pursued “serious” roles.
For whatever reason, the movie business has always attached a stigma to actors best known for comedy. Instead of being viewed as versatile performers like any other actor would be, a perception tends to develop that they’re only suitable for making people laugh. This obviously makes it much harder for them to land dramatic roles, because Hollywood insiders and audiences alike have already put them squarely in the ‘funny’ box.
Throughout his career, Wilder starred in some of the greatest comedies ever made, including The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Stir Crazy, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil. However, he was never able to stretch his wings beyond the realm of the genre, despite viewing himself as an actor first and not a comedian.
“I didn’t want to be a comedian, I wanted to be an actor,” he told Filter magazine in 2006, “A real actor. Perhaps a real comic actor, but an actor, not a comedian”.
Wilder believed that, given the chance, he would approach drama the same way he did comedy. His process was all about making choices with the performance that felt honest and grounded, no matter the context. “I do act the same way if I’m doing a comedy or a drama,” he explained, adding, “It’s just in a comedy, I’d make comic choices, but I try to make it real. Actually, the more real you are in a comedy, the funnier the comedy is.”
In Wilder’s opinion, he was able to mix enough drama into his comic roles that he was happy with his career. Still, anytime he went after a role outside the confines of comedy, he bristled at the regular refrain of, “I don’t want any comedians in this”. The worst example of this happening was when director Richard Attenborough and screenwriter William Goldman wanted him to play the lead role in the 1978 psychological horror film Magic, but the producer overruled them.
“I’m thinking in particular of one film, from Joe Levine, he’s dead now, but he was the head of Embassy Pictures,” Wilder remembered. “They were going to make a film, and the director wanted me, the author wanted me, the production designer wanted me.”
Still, despite all this support for Wilder portraying Charles ‘Corky’ Withers, a struggling magician who falls under the thrall of his possessed ventriloquist’s dummy, Levine was immovable.
To make matters more confusing, the headman had distributed The Producers, which was an enormous hit and landed Wilder an Academy Award nomination. It therefore stood to reason that Levine, of all people, would recognise the actor’s talents. Wilder even claimed he once told him he was a “great actor”. When it came down to it, though, he held fast to the stigma and insisted, “No, I don’t want any comedians”.
Ultimately, Levine cast a young Welsh actor you may have heard of as ‘Corky’. Critics hailed Anthony Hopkins for his performance, which seemed to signal his ascension into the ranks of A-list stardom, but instead it took him more than a decade to truly establish himself in that echelon with 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs.
Worse, Hopkins didn’t even like Magic, and once grumbled, “I don’t know why I did that film. They should have gone to somebody else, an American actor”. Like, say…Gene Wilder? The genius American actor who desperately wanted the role?
