“That made it a little simpler”: The role Dennis Quaid played while out of his mind on cocaine
Hollywood’s love affair with cocaine is a long and colourful one.
In fact, in one of the earliest and wildest tales of celebrity adventures, the white powder dates all the way back to the 1930s, when star Lupe Vélez found a novel application for it during the most intimate moments of lovemaking with Errol Flynn. Meanwhile, silent film star and theatre diva Tallulah Bankhead turned to it out of respect for her father. When he told her to steer clear of men and alcohol, she recalled, “He didn’t say anything about women and cocaine”.
By the time the cocaine boom hit in the 1970s, the counterculture had swept Tinseltown, and drug-taking was no longer a niche sport for the rebels. Everyone from Martin Scorsese to Carrie Fisher was spiralling with the stuff, and Jack Nicholson was rumoured to keep a pyramid of it on hand just in case the craving struck.
A slew of highly publicised deaths, overdoses, and long roads to sobriety helped to deglamorise hard drugs by the time the early 2000s rolled around, but they remain a powerful feature in Hollywood lore. Dennis Quaid has seen both sides of the coin: the literal highs and the rock bottom lows. He eventually recognised that if he didn’t stop, he was on a bullet train to an early grave, but before quitting altogether, he used it as a key resource when preparing to play rockabilly icon Jerry Lee Lewis in the 1989 film Great Balls of Fire.
As he explained to Business Insider in 2025, he had a whole year to learn how to play piano with Lewis’ flamboyant style. “Plus, I was also on cocaine,” he said, “So that made it a little simpler to be at the piano 12 hours at a time”.
It’s very hard to ignore this fact when seeing the movie; Quaid has the late 1950s hair and is lip-syncing to Lewis’s music, but he mostly just looks like a man performing the experience of being out of his mind on cocaine, which, ironically, distracts from his actual skills at playing the piano. For all his theatricality, Lewis never approached those levels of hysteria.
Quaid was quick to clarify that he didn’t suggest anyone replicate his method for learning a musical instrument, warning that doing so would put you “in a bad place”, but he could also have mentioned that there are other ways of mastering a new skill, such as practising without the interference of highly addictive stimulants. He should know this better than anyone, as before he began a career as an actor, he helped Marlon Brando learn how to play the mandolin for The Missouri Breaks.
Plus, the list of actors who have learned to play musical instruments is vast, with Hugh Grant alone having mastered the violin, piano, and guitar in pursuit of acting greatness, while everyone from Keira Knightley and Jude Law to Samuel L Jackson and Bill Murray learned an instrument for a role at least once.
At this rate, can a person really call themselves an actor if they haven’t learned their scales? Special mention goes to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who learned to play the Theremin for the 2014 Frank, presumably without the aid of cocaine.
