The role nobody wanted Patrick Swayze to play: “I couldn’t even get a script”
By the time Patrick Swayze finally got the chance to audition for one of his most defining roles, he was at the end of a long, long line of actors who turned the part down.
In fact, according to several sources tied to the film, a long line of A-listers were considered before Swayze even got a look in. We’re talking Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Gary Oldman, Robert Downey Jr, John Cusack, Willem Dafoe, and Mel Gibson – all of them apparently ahead of Swayze on the list. This, despite the actor urging his agents to push hard and get him in the running for the role.
Why was this the case, though? Well, by the mid-1990s, Swayze’s star power had started to dim thanks to several box-office duds in a row. The likes of Father Hood and City of Joy were such disasters that the glory days of Point Break and Ghost felt like they happened a decade earlier, instead of just a few years.
According to Swayze, though, there was another reason his people had such a tough time getting him in the room for this particular movie: “They wouldn’t see me, because, you know, Patrick Swayze is terminally macho.”
Now, setting aside the fact that Swayze spoke about himself in third person (always very unacceptable), this quote does speak to something important about the movie in question. Swayze was gagging to play the part of Vida, a New York drag queen, in the lengthily-titled To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, a movie that was properly forward-thinking for its time.
Back then, there were extremely few mainstream movies made starring gay characters, and even the ones that did get made, such as Philadelphia, revolved around the AIDS crisis. To Wong Foo, by contrast, was a fun comedy, produced by Steven Spielberg, that put a trio of gay drag queens front and centre. Suddenly, it seemed like every male star in Hollywood was keen to put on their best wig and flowing gown to audition, as problematic as that may appear through a 2025 lens.
To the filmmaker’s frustration, though, the role of Vida – who anchored the film with many of its most heartfelt monologues – proved extremely hard to cast, with many of the auditionees either looking terrible in drag, or not affording the role the sensitivity it needed. “Literally, what would happen is they would go into the makeup, they’d put on their clothes,” director Beeban Kidron told Yahoo Entertainment in 2015. “And all of them, there were only two responses. The first one was, ‘Gasp! But I’m beautiful!’ And the second one was, ‘I would fuck myself!’”
Eventually, after so many of Kidron’s preferred options proved a bust, the casting process circled back to Swayze. “Early on, when I first heard about it, I couldn’t even get a script for it,” Swayze told The Moving Picture Show. “It wasn’t until the end, when they had exhausted all their other possibilities, that I got to go in.” Incredibly, Swayze’s audition was so late in the game that he wasn’t even furnished with the script until a few hours before his reading, and when he saw how intensive the dialogue was, he knew he wouldn’t have time to memorise it. So, he called an audible.
“I told them, ‘Look, I can’t do these words. So if this is a case where I have to do these words, forget it,’” Swayze recalled. “‘But if you let me come in, I’ll give you a half-hour monologue on my life as a drag queen, and see if I can turn into Vida while I watch her materialise in the mirror.’”
Kidron then sat transfixed as he improvised an hour-long monologue, inspired by his own youth in Texas, with the subtle change that this version of little Patrick had feminine tendencies he didn’t quite understand.
“By the time I was done, I looked up, and everybody had tears in their eyes,” Swayze claimed, finally nabbing the part it seemed like nobody wanted him to have. For Kidron, though, the cherry on top was that the actor everyone thought was too macho for the part actually wound up looking amazing in drag. “I don’t think this movie would have worked if Vida looked like the back end of a bus,” she laughed.
