“You’ve got to be out of your mind”: the role John Wayne said he wasn’t “good enough” to play
Actors thrive on confidence, and the more successful they are, the more confident they become. As one of the most successful actors of his era, not to mention in Hollywood history, John Wayne was a confident fella who always believed in himself.
It took him a few years to get there, though, but once John Ford’s Stagecoach finally propelled him toward the rungs on the industry ladder he’d always been aiming for, ‘The Duke’ never looked back. For fuck sake, he even thought he could play Genghis Khan and get away with it, which takes some stones.
Of course, things were made a lot easier for him when most of the scripts he was offered were either written with him in mind or had been tailored to suit a John Wayne-type. That meant he didn’t have to stretch himself too often, and since audiences continued to show up, why would he bother?
When you think of the ‘Golden Age’ icon, beacon of Americana, and the self-styled manliest man to ever do macho shit on the silver screen, you see ‘The Duke’. There are rugged plains, wide-open vistas, clear distinctions between good and evil, saloon punch-ups and barroom brawls, and despicable villains getting their arses handed to them while he barely breaks a sweat.
And yet, for some reason, John Ford looked at his surrogate son in 1940 and saw only one thing: a Swedish farmer and sea captain on an English cargo ship. Understandably, Wayne thought he was losing it and tried his hardest to convince the director that there was no chance he’d ever be able to pull it off in The Long Voyage Home.
“I’m going to do this picture, Duke,” he was told. “It’s based on some plays by Eugene O’Neill. The main character is a Swedish sea captain. That’s you.” That was not him, and he tried to explain that. “You’ve got to be out of your mind,” he responded. “Anyway, I can’t do that O’Neill stuff. I’m not good enough. Go get some high-class actor.”
Since that wasn’t the way their personal or professional relationship worked, Ford refused to listen, telling Wayne, “You’re going to do it,” which he did. ‘The Duke’ did put in the hard yards, trying his best to master something that at least resembled some affectation of a Swedish accent, which required about as much coaching as you’d expect, given that he rarely sounded like anyone other than himself.
His performance was alright, if far from spectacular, and it makes more sense that Wayne would be unusually trepidatious onscreen when he didn’t think he was qualified enough to play the part in the first place, and the only reason he agreed was that he didn’t know how to say no to ‘Pappy’.
The Long Voyage Home did notch six Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’, but it was a disaster at the box office. Clearly, pivoting from Stagecoach to Swedish sea captains so quickly wasn’t the right movie for Wayne’s burgeoning career, but it didn’t take him long to recover.
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