The role that haunted John Wayne to his core: “The meanest, coldest eyes”
To his detractors, John Wayne was a limited actor, only capable of playing slight variations of his well-established star persona. He wasn’t someone who fully immersed himself in a character or transformed before audiences’ eyes—he was simply “John Wayne in a different situation” in every role. While there’s some truth to this, it’s also an oversimplification that doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny.
In one of his most famous roles, for example, a co-star was convinced Wayne had internalised his complex, intimidating character so thoroughly that he wondered if it was haunting the controversial screen legend.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Wayne is that, while he would tell anyone who listened that he despised method acting, he was arguably one of its most famous practitioners. You see, “John Wayne” was as much a creation as any of the characters he played on-screen. The real-life Marion Morrison painstakingly crafted the hard-bitten, tough, yet heroic figure of John Wayne after a series of false starts in his younger Hollywood days. In fact, he committed so completely to the gimmick that he arguably started believing his own mythology, and ‘The Duke’ was born.
In truth, when Wayne appeared in films, he was already method-acting before the cameras even rolled. In a large number of his movies, he admittedly leaned a little too hard on this successful persona, but it brought him untold success, so he was unlikely to change. Every now and again, though, he found a part that required a little bit more of him – and the iconic role of Ethan Edwards in 1956’s The Searchers was one of those parts.
John Ford’s seminal western is rightly viewed as one of the greatest movies in the genre’s history, and it influenced a generation of filmmakers who came after. For example, in the New Hollywood era, directors including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Paul Schrader, and John Carpenter all worshipped at the altar of The Searchers.
“I can be a method actor too.”
john wayne
Wayne’s performance as Edwards is etched in cinema lore at this point, but it also has elements that make it troubling to audiences. While Edwards is ostensibly the hero of the film, he’s also a terrifying, vengeful, and racist man whose motives for being so hellbent on rescuing his abducted niece are highly questionable. Edwards is undoubtedly one of Wayne’s darkest characters, and his co-star Harry Carey Jr believed he saw something different from Wayne when he was playing him.
In John Wayne: Treasures, Carey noted, “When I looked up at [Wayne] in rehearsal, it was into the meanest, coldest eyes I had ever seen. I don’t know how he moulded that character. Perhaps he’d known someone like Ethan Edwards as a kid.” Carey claimed that Wayne even acted like Edwards between takes and when the cast was eating dinner together. On top of that, there was no joking around with Wayne like there would have been while shooting other pictures. As Carey put it, “Ethan was always in his eyes.”
If Carey’s perspective is to be believed, it certainly sounds like Wayne dove deeper into Edwards than many of his other characters and utilised some of the method-y tactics he claimed to hate. Heck, he even admitted as much when he told an interviewer that he put himself in Edwards’ shoes to find his motivation, imagining if Communists kidnapped his niece instead of Native Americans.
“I thought, ‘What if the commies were the ones who had done this?'” revealed Wayne. “‘What if they had managed to burn down my home and kill my family?'” He then quipped, “You see, I can be a method actor too.”
Never Miss A Tale
The Far Out John Wayne Newsletter
All the latest stories about John Wayne from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.