“You make some bad decisions”: The role Jason Bateman doesn’t want to be remembered for
Jason Bateman is one of those actors who has flown under the radar for much of his career despite a filmography that puts him among the ranks of the most starry celebrities.
Maybe you were introduced to him through 2000s comedies like Juno, The Switch, and Horrible Bosses, or maybe it was his turn as the only sane member of the Bluth family in the sleeper hit sitcom Arrested Development, or perhaps you became acquainted with the star during his deviation into dark material in the Netflix crime series Ozark, but chances are, you don’t remember him as a child star.
Believe it or not, Bateman began acting professionally at the tender age of 11 as a kid in Little House on the Prairie and the ‘80s sitcom Silver Spoons. In the ‘80s, he even enjoyed a brief period as a teen heartthrob alongside the likes of Rob Lowe and Michael J Fox, and while he might never have crossed the threshold of a John Hughes set, he was building a career in that mould.
Any actor who gets such an early start and manages to reach greater professional heights with every decade has some embarrassing work behind them; for instance, Ryan Gosling was in the Mickey Mouse Club, and Scarlett Johansson appeared in a sketch on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show when she was ten.
Everyone gets their start somewhere, but most famous actors who begin their careers as children would probably prefer that the evidence be buried, and in Bateman’s case, there is a lot of material to work with in that regard.
He’s been doing good work for decades, but the projects haven’t necessarily done his acting talents justice, and the role that still haunts him is a doozy, even by the standards of Gosling and Johansson. In an interview with Parade in 2009, the Arrested Development star revealed that he is reminded of his contributions to the 1987 Teen Wolf sequel, Teen Wolf Too, more than he would like.
“Still to this day, what is it, 20 years later, I’ll get a drunk heckler at a Dodger game saying, ‘I remember you, Teen Wolf’,” he said, adding, “Look, you can’t only be in great films, and you make some bad decisions”.
In all fairness, accepting the starring role in the sequel to a wildly popular film is a savvy career move for a young star, even if the material leaves much to be desired. The original Teen Wolf starred Michael J Fox as a regular all-American kid who discovers he’s a werewolf, and it was a surprise hit at the box office.
Bateman’s follow-up saw the future Ozark star playing the cousin of Fox’s character, going about his business at college, struggling to integrate, when he spontaneously begins transforming into a werewolf. This is a spectacularly terrible movie, but it no doubt taps into teenage nostalgia for viewers of a certain age; it may not deserve to be a cult classic, but it’s a pretty showy feature film debut.
The actor doesn’t denounce the project altogether, saying, “I choose to remember it as a quirky, little, fun job as opposed to the one that put a nail in a coffin for me”. Plus, within a handful of years, he was starring opposite the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Robert Wagner, and Anthony Quinn, so he can afford to be magnanimous towards the film that helped put him on the map.
