The role Bill Paxton always regretted turning down: “I think that put the kibosh on my career with him”
In the 1980s, there was nobody bigger than iconic director and writer John Hughes, responsible for some of the most cherished movies of the age, from The Breakfast Club to Pretty in Pink to Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
He worked with several of the biggest names of the time, notably several members of the so-called ‘Brat Pack’, but one of the lesser-known Hughes affiliates was Bill Paxton, whose career really took off after appearing in one of his films.
Paxton had a supporting role in Hughes’ 1985 movie Weird Science, starring Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith as two down-on-their-luck nerds who create their dream woman, played by Kelly LeBrock, via a computer: an outlandish concept at the time, but one we are drawing depressingly close to in real life. Paxton plays Chet, the older brother of Mitchell-Smith’s character, who serves as a minor antagonist in the story. You might know the movie’s theme song, which was performed by Oingo Boingo and was even parodied once on Beavis and Butt-Head.
This was the only time these two worked together, but it didn’t have to be, as Paxton revealed to AV Club in 2012, he actually turned down the chance to reunite with the director who had given him such a big break. “I was offered a small part, the part Richard Edson did, as the parking attendant in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and I should’ve done it,” he said,
“I’d done a bigger supporting role in Weird Science, so I was trying to hold out for something a little better,” he added. “But I think that might’ve… I never heard from John after that. I think that put the kibosh on my career with him. I was sad to hear he had passed away. I’d always wanted to write him, just to tell him how much the role of Chet had meant to me, both personally and to my career.”
The almighty Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was the next film Hughes directed after Weird Science and made a huge star out of Matthew Broderick, and while the role Paxton would have played is a small one, it’s also one of the most memorable parts of the film. When the title character and his friends leave an expensive car with two garage attendants, played by Edson and Larry ‘Flash’ Jenkins, they steal it and go on a joyride, the ‘Star Wars’ theme playing as the car flies through the roads, and that’s a personal favourite movie moment of mine.
In the same year that Ferris Bueller captivated audiences, Paxton played arguably the most famous role of his career as Hicks in Aliens, which catapulted him to global fame to the point where he didn’t need Hughes anymore. Sadly, neither man is with us anymore; Hughes died in 2009 from a heart attack, while Paxton passed away in 2017 following a stroke.
Not everyone enjoyed working on the movie, but Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is nothing short of a cinematic institution, and watching Bill Paxton soar through the sky in that Ferrari would have been yet another fabulous tidbit from this already gorgeous piece of film.
