“He gave me carte blanche to treat him like a turd”: the one actor John Wayne let talk down to ‘The Duke’
By the 1970s, John Wayne’s status as a Hollywood icon was set in stone. Even as the actor’s politics became less and less popular and his movies sidled closer to self-parody, his fans were as rabid as ever. Having already spent more than four decades in front of the camera, ‘The Duke’ was America’s cowboy, the country’s licence to mythologise its history through rugged individualism and honour.
One star learned firsthand how loyal Wayne’s fans could be. In Mark Rydell’s 1972 western The Cowboys, Bruce Dern plays the head of a gang of cattle rustlers. Wayne plays a rancher who is forced to hire a new set of ranch hands to complete his long-distance cattle drive. Not only does Dern’s character taunt the older man about his age and terrorise his young employees, but he also shoots him from behind as he walks away, a shocking show of cowardliness and cruelty and one of Wayne’s most memorable on-screen death scenes.
Dern’s performance is chilling and deranged, and that’s exactly how Wayne wanted it. Remembering the production, Dern told Cowboys & Indians in 2015 that the older actor made sure that his younger co-star was not intimidated by him. “[R]ight at the start,” Dern recounted. “[H]e says to me, ‘I want you to do us a favour.’ He was including himself, Mark Rydell, and the scriptwriters. He said, ‘From now on, consider me to be somebody you can publicly kick the shit out of 24 hours a day on the set. Because I want these little kids [playing the cowboys of the title] to be absolutely terrified of you.’ He gave me carte blanche to just treat him like a turd. So I was on him, talking back to him and stuff, for the few days I was there. And he would do things like call out: ‘Hey, Mr. Dern, would you get over here?’ I thought, Hey, John Wayne gives you a ‘mister’ status. My first day, he’s calling me mister. How about that? That’s pretty cool.”
He soon learned that it was not, in fact, pretty cool. 40 years later, the actor said he still receives hate mail from Wayne fans who despise him for the character.
It’s possible that Dern’s role was less hated at the time the film came out. Wayne had just given a controversial interview to Playboy in which he stated, among other things, that he “believe[d] in white supremacy.” Laura Dern, daughter of Bruce Dern, remembered that her father was receiving heat from the other side simply for taking the role in The Cowboys, saying that some of her friends’ parents cancelled play dates with her because of how disgusted they were that her dad was accepting a role opposite a self-avowed racist.
Dern took it in his stride. When Wayne told him, “When this picture comes out, and audiences see you kill me — they’re gonna hate you for this,” Dern invoked the university campus that was the epicentre of the Civil Rights movement at the time. “Maybe,” he retorted. “But at Berkeley, I’ll be a fucking hero!”
The character might have gotten Dern blacklisted from the screens of certain Wayne fans, but his trajectory in the industry wasn’t derailed. He was already a rising star in the New Hollywood movement, and as the days of John Wayne westerns faded, the time for experimental, low-budget movies with Method actors was on the ascent. He starred in the psychological sci-fi movie Silent Running the same year as The Cowboys and went on to receive Oscar nominations for 1979’s Vietnam War drama Coming Home and 2014’s Nebraska.
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