The only time Whoopi Goldberg played a role that Bruce Willis turned down: “What about me?”
If you went to the cinema to see a comedy movie in the late 1980s/early 1990s, chances are you would have seen the host of The View, Whoopi Goldberg, who was an integral part of the explosion of American comedy movies from around this time.
She was a massive star, and any movie would have been lucky to have her, but, as it turns out, she was rarely anybody’s first choice. Her role as a bank worker who becomes part of a global spy plot in Jumpin’ Jack Flash was initially earmarked for Shelley Long, but her decision not to appear in the movie led to mass rewrites during production.
Fatal Beauty, which starred her as drug busting detective, would have been Cher’s had she not dropped out to win an Oscar for Moonstruck instead, and even Sister Act, Goldberg’s most famous movie, was initially going to star Bette Midler.
For the most interesting case of ‘what could have been’ in Goldberg’s career, we have to go to the comedy heist movie, Burglar, the film about a woman named Bernie (Goldberg), a career criminal and master thief, where, when a dead body is discovered at a house she recently stole from, she must use her skills to clear her name and ensure that her illicit life remains a secret.
On paper, this feels like a typical Goldberg role, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, for as revealed in her memoirs, the EGOT winner was not meant to play the protagonist, the honour of which would have fallen to Bruce Willis.
The story, which was co-written by future head of Marvel Television Jeph Loeb, was initially envisioned as a serious action flick, as the novel on which the film is based, The Burglar in the Closet, features a male protagonist. However, the Pulp Fiction star wanted nothing to do with it.
Goldberg was already attached to the film in a smaller role of playing the lead character’s friend and neighbour, a part that was filled by Bobcat Goldthwait in the finished version. When Willis backed out of the project, Goldberg stuck her neck out, writing in her memoirs that she simply asked, “What about me?”, and the rest, as they say, is history.
When Burglar came out, Goldberg probably wished she’d kept quiet as the film was savaged by critics, who found it about as funny as having a piano dropped on one’s head. Perhaps the most scathing review came from Lawrence Block, the author of the original book, who watched Burglar on a plane and didn’t realise it was based on his novel until the end credits, leaving him so outraged by the adaptation that he deliberately wrote future books in the series so that they would be unfilmable.
Burglar was released in 1987, just one year before Willis starred in the film that would change his career forever, Die Hard, which raises the point of whether he would have been able to fully commit to the latter, hadn’t he walked away from the former project. Would we have seen Richard Gere as John McClane instead? God only knows.
