The iconic role Henry Fonda almost turned down: “I am your boy”
Henry Fonda was Hollywood’s consummate good guy, a paragon of quiet decency in a town full of tough guys and playboys. He may have had a complicated personal life, but as far as the movie-going public was concerned, he was the modern embodiment of Abraham Lincoln and the perfect cinematic equivalent to John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad.
Fonda started his career on Broadway before transitioning to Hollywood, and from the start, he was cast in roles of honourable, often uptight young men. Like John Wayne, Fonda’s career was shaped in no small part by his collaborations with director John Ford.
Unlike Wayne, however, many of the films they made together were not westerns. 1939’s Young Mr. Lincoln put his air of quiet decency on full display and prompted the director to cast him in his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. As Tom Joad, the downtrodden protagonist who leads his family out of the Dust Bowl and toward the supposed paradise of California, Fonda was given another opportunity to personify social justice on screen.
By the late 1960s, Fonda’s reputation as the good guy of Hollywood was iron-clad, especially after he appeared in Sidney Lumet’s classic legal drama 12 Angry Men, playing the lone juror willing to stick his neck out for justice. So when Sergio Leone sent him a script for Once Upon a Time in the West and offered him the role of the murderous outlaw Frank, he was understandably lukewarm about the idea. The fact that he was sent a poorly translated script didn’t help. He turned it down. But when he called up his friend Eli Wallach, who had starred in Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Wallach told him in no uncertain terms to go back and take the part. Working with Leone, he said, was an opportunity that no actor in his right mind would give up.
Based on this advice, Fonda went back and watched the second two films in the Fistful of Dollars trilogy, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He must have seen something that he liked, because it prompted him to pick up the phone and call Leone to revise his previous response. “I am your boy,” he told the director (via Variety). “Where do you want me? Make a mark and I will stand there.”
His change of heart should not be taken lightly, even with the hindsight we now have about Leone’s stature in the film industry. Fonda was in his sixth decade at the time and had spent years in Hollywood as a revered leading man. To turn to a Spaghetti Western director and grow out his sideburns was a courageous deviation, not to mention the fact that he would be committing many murder (including the murder of children) without a shadow of remorse throughout the film.
In the end, Fonda had zero regrets. In fact, he couldn’t praise the experience highly enough. After the production wrapped, he said “[Leone is] one of the great directors in the business, and I’ve seen quite a few in my 33 years.” That’s high praise coming from someone who worked with John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler, and Sidney Lumet.
