The shocking original villain for Keanu Reeves’ ‘Speed’
Everybody knows the movie Speed. The story of a young police officer needing to keep a bus full of people from dropping below 50 miles per hour to avoid a bomb going off is one of the most instantly recognisable in action history, and it helped make stars of Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. It also allowed for the existence of Speed 2: Cruise Control, but the less said about that, the better.
The villain behind this dastardly plot is Howard Payne, a serial bomber who holds a vendetta against Reeves’ character, Jack Traven. Payne was brought to life by the wonderful Dennis Hopper, who really needed a hit after starring in the atrocious Super Mario Bros movie the year before. The character isn’t just smart – he lures a bunch of cops to their deaths by planting bombs all over his house – but he’s layered too, as we find out that he was once a bomb squad officer who now harbours resentment towards the police. However, things could have looked very different if the original plans for Speed had gone ahead.
Graham Yost, who wrote the script for Speed, explained on the Script Apart podcast that Jack’s original enemy was actually his partner Harry. “The idea was that he’s not the bad guy in the elevator sequence,” said Yost, who also worked on Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes and the miniseries Band of Brothers. “That guy just dies, but he conjures up as if that guy had returned because Jack shot him, and his life went to hell.”
Yost is referring to the opening of the movie, in which Jack and Harry stop Payne from killing an elevator full of people. Payne takes Harry hostage, so Jack shoots him in the leg, giving the bomber nowhere to go. In the first draft, Payne would have then blown himself up, as opposed to faking his death, which happens in the finished product. As for Harry, played by Jeff Daniels, he serves as Jack’s man in the chair, giving him advice over the phone whilst he’s stuck on the bus. He eventually dies when raiding Payne’s house, which turns out to be booby-trapped.
It certainly would have been interesting to see Jack grapple not only with a bomb but also with the betrayal of his close friend. That being said, we wouldn’t have gotten Hopper, who really made the part his own. He ended up winning the MTV Movie Award for ‘Best Villain’ in 1995, beating out Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire and Jeremy Irons’ voice performance as Scar in The Lion King. And he did so without the need for a catchy song or an enormous wig. Now that’s acting.
Elsewhere on the podcast, Yost divulged that he had very lofty ambitions for the Payne character. “When I was a kid growing up, Auric Goldfinger was a great bad guy,” he said. “Blofeld was a great bad guy. Dr. No was a little weird, but a lot of the bad guys were really good.” His main influence, however, was Alan Rickman’s legendary portrayal of Hans Gruber in Die Hard, which he called “the best of all”. In fact, he even changed the movie’s finale to mirror the final confrontation between Gruber and John McClane: “I thought, man, Jack and the bad guy aren’t going to have any time together. Maybe over a phone, but they won’t [have] that mano a mano thing going on.”
Speed ended up being a huge success, taking over $350million at the box office and winning two Oscars. Would this have been the case without Hopper’s beautifully overblown take on the villainous role? I guess we’ll never know.
