The scene Patrick Swayze was too wasted to shoot: “How dare you be so unprofessional?”
Once he’d conquered his addiction, Patrick Swayze remained open and honest about his decades-long struggle with alcoholism, but very rarely would those personal problems affect his professional life.
The actor started hitting the bottle hard after his father’s death in 1982, and after noticing the increasing strain it was putting on his marriage to Lisa Niemi, which culminated in a short-term separation, he checked himself into rehab and was clean and sober by the time he shot 2004’s King Solomon’s Mines.
He called his role as Allan Quartermain “a godsend” for his career for several reasons, but back in the mid-80s, when he was still drinking heavily, turning up on set to shoot a scene while clearly inebriated resulted in the entire sequence being scrapped, and left his co-star seriously pissed off at his antics.
Having been surrounded by a cabal of Hollywood’s hottest up-and-coming stars on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, a production where the cast were “hanging out together, smoking cigarettes, going out for drinks, and just generally running wild,” much the same was true of 1984’s Red Dawn.
Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, C Thomas Howell, and Jennifer Grey were all young actors who were predicted to have bright futures, but Swayze’s extracurricular activities would get the better of him. Grey, who he’d famously co-starred with again in Dirty Dancing, recounted an unfortunate moment during an appearance on the Awards Chatter podcast.
“We were in this, you know, sleeping bag, and he, I guess, was nervous or whatever,” she recalled, with the pair scheduled to shoot a sex scene. “And he came into the sleeping bag drunk, and he didn’t know his lines. And then it got cut. And they said, ‘We’ll come back and reshoot it’. But, of course, they didn’t.”
She wasn’t holding him entirely responsible, though, since she wasn’t operating at 100% either. “I was smoking a lot of weed in those days, too, and so I was super paranoid, and I was scared,” Grey explained. “So I didn’t sleep the whole night. So when I went in to shoot my big love scene, my big death scene, love scene, romantic scene with him, I was so angry because I was all self-righteous.”
Despite being susceptible to some offset enhancements of her own, Grey still called out Swayze for his behaviour. “I was like, ‘How dare you be so unprofessional?'” she asked him. Red Dawn wasn’t an enjoyable experience for the actor in general, who admitted that “it was just not my scene, the whole movie,” which left her “trying to hang in there” more than anything else.
It wasn’t Swayze’s greatest moment, and his intoxication didn’t only mean that he and Grey couldn’t shoot the scene as scheduled; it meant the entire sequence was scrapped from the film.
