The ‘Saving Private Ryan’ star who refused to let go of their character: “For the longest time”
As one of the most intense, immersive, and realistic depictions of warfare ever committed to film, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan would live or die by the commitment of its ensemble cast.
It’s all well and good to take the audience’s breath away when the bullets start flying and the deafening thud of combat rings in their ears, but the overall impact of the classic World War II story would be significantly lessened if the actors were anything less than believable.
To achieve that goal, Spielberg put all of his key characters through a rigorous boot camp, which was such a miserable experience for Ed Burns that he called it the worst time of his life. Not only that, but the actors threatened to stage a real mutiny and abandon their training, only for Tom Hanks to get an even better handle on John Miller by diffusing the tension.
Of course, Matt Damon was instructed not to attend, in service of both the movie and his relationship with his co-stars. The central squad sent to locate the title character behind enemy lines were supposed to be resentful of being deployed on what amounted to a suicide mission to retrieve a solitary soldier, and by avoiding boot camp, the animosity didn’t have to be faked.
That, coupled with the staggering set pieces, combined to craft a seminal film that fell victim to one of the most egregious robberies in Academy Awards history when Shakespeare in Love was named ‘Best Picture’. It remains an embarrassing head-scratcher, but even though cameras stopped rolling on Saving Private Ryan in September 1997, one actor held onto his character for a lot longer than expected.
“For the longest time, I wore Private Mellish underwear because we all were given underwear,” Adam Goldberg explained to Looper. “I don’t know why they gave us underwear, but it was just Calvins. It’s the same underwear that I wear, those black Calvins. But it said ‘Mellish’ in all the underwear, I guess because we got wet a lot, so we’d have to change all the time.”
Actors stealing keepsakes from sets is a standard practice in Hollywood, but an entire set of pristine pants? That’s something else altogether. Goldberg suffered one of cinema’s most heartbreaking and excruciatingly drawn-out death scenes when Mellish met his end at the hands of a German bayonet, but it’s at least reassuring to know that even if the actor shit himself, a fresh pair of kecks were close at hand.
After filming his final scene in Saving Private Ryan, Goldberg was parading around wearing underwear emblazoned with his character’s name for months and potentially years. There’s holding onto a role and struggling to let go, and then there’s being reminded of it and gazing wistfully into the middle distance every time a change of pants is required.
