The 2001 movie Norman Reedus wanted nothing to do with: “No! Absolutely not!”
Some actors are inherently drawn to playing characters who tend to err on the darker side of things; you can’t imagine Danny Trejo playing a flamboyant weatherman, for instance. And equally, it’s tough to think of Norman Reedus in a role that doesn’t involve him offing undead people with a bow and arrow.
The actor has played all manner of violent ruffians over the years, as far back as 1999’s Boondock Saints, in fact, when he was one half of the murderous McManus twins in the vigilante action thriller that didn’t do much at the box office but quickly found cult status once it was released on home video.
It was Reedus’ breakthrough after toiling away as a model, painter, photographer and motorbike salesman in his native Florida, but it didn’t prove to be the launchpad for proper Hollywood success he might have hoped for, and neither was the divisive Nicolas Cage thriller 8mm that he had a role in that year too.
He might have had more global exposure had he listened to his agent and taken on a part as Jennifer Love Hewitt’s love interest in the 2001 romcom Heartbreakers a year later, but even at that age, he was wary of taking on anything he thought of as anodyne or not threatening enough.
He told GQ that his representative at the time informed him: “They like you for this part, and it’s a Jennifer Love Hewitt movie”, with Reedus responding: “And I’m like, ‘Well, what do I do?’ And they’re, ‘You’re her boyfriend,’ And I go, ‘Well, do I rape her? Do I kill her? What do I do?’ And they go, ‘You’re her sweet boyfriend.’ And I was like, ‘No! Absolutely not!'”
Which is… a bit weird. Anyway, had he not wanted to play a part in doing all that horrible stuff, he would have been involved in a movie that also featured Sigourney Weaver, Gene Hackman and Ray Liotta, and which, while getting pretty mixed reviews from the critics, did well enough at the box office that it continued to make Love Hewitt one of the more in-demand young stars of the era.
Instead, Reedus had to wait another couple of years for a major movie, a small-ish role in Wesley Snipes’ slashy action film Blade II. And then another five years until his next one, an even smaller role as a morgue detective in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster with Denzel Washington.
He made an ill-advised Boondock Saints sequel in 2009 which was panned by critics and completely failed to capture any of the magic of the original, but then everything changed once he was cast in AMC’s zombie behemoth The Walking Dead the following year, sparking a 12 year run as Daryl Dixon that included his own spin-off series of the same name, which is still going and which he executive produces.
Meanwhile, he’s going to be appearing in a third Boondock Saints movie, plus an intriguing film called Pendulum, co-starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which is set to be a psychological folk horror about a couple heading to a healing retreat in Mexico, only for one of them to fall under the spell of the spiritual leader.
