Robin Williams’ heartbreaking struggles on his final movie: “Is any of this usable? Do I suck?”
Like many comedians who built their careers on making people laugh, Robin Williams frequently wondered if he still had the magic touch that made him one of his generation’s most influential, beloved, and popular performers on stage and screen.
It’s an understandable question for a performer to ask themselves, especially one who began their stand-up career in the mid-1970s and spent the next 40 years at the top of their game. Williams was a phenom long before he was a superstar, and he was always the person who doubted himself the most.
His comedic filmography was littered with ups and downs, with every smash hit like Mrs Doubtfire or Aladdin being joined by an underwhelming effort like Flubber or Toys, and that inconsistency made it completely understandable for the Academy Award winner to continually doubt whether irrelevance was looming over the horizon.
Of course, it wasn’t, with Williams remaining a tour-de-force and maintaining his credentials as a Hollywood great, regardless of how many bad films he made. However, things took a more heartbreaking turn when he was filming Shawn Levy’s Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, which became his final live-action credit.
Even though he’d already played Theodore Roosevelt in the first two instalments of the family-friendly fantasy franchise and was highlighted as one of the strongest suits of an otherwise middling pair of blockbusters, Levy revealed that the trilogy-closing chapter showed him a side of Williams he’d never seen before.
“I would say a month into the shoot, it was clear to me, it was clear to all of us on set, that something was going on with Robin,” he recalled. “We saw that Robin was struggling in a way that he hadn’t before, to remember lines and to combine the right words with the performance.”
Principal photography on Secret of the Tomb ran from January to May 2014, ending just three months before Williams’ death. Although his struggles with depression were common knowledge and he’d discussed them openly in the past, his Lewy body dementia diagnosis wasn’t made public until after his passing, which affected the actor’s belief in his abilities.
“When Robin would call me at ten at night, at two in the morning, at four in the morning, saying, ‘Is it usable? Is any of this usable? Do I suck? What’s going on?’ I would reassure him,” Levy offered. “I said, ‘You are still you. I know it. The world knows it. You just need to remember that.'”
“My faith in him never left, but I saw his morale crumbling,” Levy said. “I saw a guy that wasn’t himself, and that was unforgivable.” It was clear to the filmmaker that Williams was struggling with something much deeper than performance anxiety, but the facts wouldn’t become clear until after they’d parted ways.
Secret of the Tomb was released four months after Williams’ death and will always be remembered as his final role in a live-action film, and as much as he doubted himself, it still features several glimpses of the spark that made him an enduring icon.
