The co-star Jason Bateman hated working with: “A pain in the ass”
It’s impossible to like every single person you work with; everyone has annoying little idiosyncrasies or habits that start to drive you up the wall, whether it’s coughing or catchphrases or consistently stealing the M&S ready meal you were looking forward to, and Jason Bateman has been in the acting game longer than most, so it’s probably no surprise there are a couple of names on his shitlist.
Luckily, his latest movie, Zootopia 2, is an animation, which means he won’t really have had to spend any time with co-stars, instead hanging out in a recording booth trying to pretend to be a criminally-minded fox; however, that wasn’t the case when he was appearing on all kinds of TV shows as a youngster in the 1980s, and ran across a famously curmudgeonly mustache-bearing old actor.
That actor was Wilford Brimley, and he and Bateman were to appear together on the network TV drama Our House, which ran between 1986 and 1988. It was about three generations of the same family living in a house in California, with the former as the head of the family, who was only 51 when he started filming the show, but genuinely looked 71, and that’s being generous. Ageing worked differently back then apparently, because Paul Rudd definitely does not look like that, and he’s 56.
Bateman guest-starred on the show in one episode, and it appears right from the off there were alarm bells ringing, with Brimley seemingly unable to separate his deliberately miserable character from real life, regarding which Bateman told The AV Club:
“Wilford Brimley was a pain in the ass. He played, I guess, the dad on the show, and I, a young actor, show up on the set… It’s like a four-page scene I have with this guy, and he cuts the middle two pages and doesn’t tell me ’til we’re rolling. He offered no explanation. I guess he didn’t like it.”
Bateman might only have been 19 when he appeared on the show, but he wasn’t exactly wet behind the ears; in fact he was already almost a veteran of the small screen having regularly appeared in massive shows like Little House on the Prairie, Knight Rider and St Elsewhere, aside from playing a lead role in the sequel to Teen Wolf, so he was probably right to be aggrieved at Brimley messing him about.
Luckily for the pair of them, he only appeared on the show once, and it got cancelled soon afterwards anyway, and while Brimley hung about for about another 30 years or so, he really only popped up in adverts for “dia-beetus” treatments in the US, while Bateman as we know, has moved from TV to movies and back in a big way, really finding his stride in the last couple of decades with big comedy hits like Game Night, Horrible Bosses and The Muppets.
That’s aside from his award-winning work in major TV shows, probably the best-known of which is Netflix’s Ozark, the drug-dealing drama that landed him several gong nominations, including for a stint directing the show.
He also picked up a ‘Best Actor’ Golden Globe for his work on Arrested Development, the brilliant comedy that originally began in 2003 and then returned ten years later to renewed success.
