The movie Dennis Hopper wanted everyone to know he definitely wasn’t in: “Nope”
It’s sometimes hard to fathom the sheer length and breadth of the career enjoyed by everyone’s favourite cinematic maniac, Dennis Hopper. To people of a certain generation, he is the countercultural icon of Easy Rider; to another, he’s the gas-inhaling psychopathic gangster from Blue Velvet; and others may remember him most fondly as an in-demand 1990s action movie villain. Amazingly, though, he actually began his career alongside ’50s icon James Dean, and this led to a common misconception that he starred in a similar movie of that era. Rest assured, though, he didn’t.
Hopper’s big screen debut came as a fresh-faced teenager in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, the movie that made Dean a symbol of uber-cool teen rebellion in the ’50s. He played a minor character named ‘Goon,’ and found that he learned a considerable amount by simply watching Dean work. In fact, in classic Hopper fashion, he admitted that he thought he was hot shit, having just performed a Shakespeare play in San Diego’s Globe Theatre – but then he saw what Dean was doing, and it blew his mind.
“I was 18 years old and thought I was the best young actor in the world,” Hopper chuckled to The AV Club. “Then I saw Dean. I had never seen anybody improvise before. I had never seen anybody do things that weren’t on the page.” This stunned Hopper, so he claimed he grabbed Dean and exclaimed, “I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re working so far over my head. What should I do? Should I go to New York and study with Strasberg? What should I do?”
The advice Dean gave Hopper stuck with him for his whole career – and it didn’t involve schlepping all the way to New York. “No, no, no,” Hopper claims Dean said. “Just start doing things, don’t show them. Just start living in the moment-to-moment reality. Smoke the cigarette; don’t act smoking the cigarette.”
Amazingly, Hopper’s second credited film role was also in a Dean film, and he once again soaked up as much knowledge as he could from the young star. He revealed that it began with him observing Dean again, as he had done on Rebel, but then the roles were reversed, and Dean began observing what Hopper was bringing to the table. “That was what I remember out of Rebel and Giant, basically,” he mused. “Then, he died two weeks before we finished Giant. I worked with him the last year of his life.”
Curiously, though, if you look at specific biographies of Hopper’s early career, there’s another movie from this era that it is often claimed he was in but remained uncredited for. Johnny Guitar was a western that came out over a year before Rebel, and it starred Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden. However, when Hopper was asked about his supposed role in this picture by The AV Club, he said in no uncertain terms, “I was never in Johnny Guitar.”
Amusingly, when the interviewer responded, “Not at all?” as if Hopper might have forgotten something as vital as his screen debut, he stated, “Nope. And it’s everywhere in my bio. I know why that happens.”
Hopper explained that Johnny Guitar was directed by Nicholas Ray, who helmed Rebel Without a Cause a year later, so the two movies – and Hopper’s small part in one of them – must have become confused in people’s heads. To make the idea of him being in Johnny Guitar even more impossible, though, Hopper chuckled, “I wasn’t even in Hollywood when he made Johnny Guitar.”
