Why Wesley Snipes sabotaged Keanu Reeves on Woody Harrelson’s behalf: “Like dirty laundry”
In Hollywood, back-scratching is as common as nepotism, with actors and filmmakers constantly pulling favours for friends. When Wesley Snipes wanted to work alongside Woody Harrelson, he figured one of the easiest ways to make it happen was to stab Keanu Reeves in the back.
Self-preservation and selfishness are two of the key tenets to making it as a movie star, because everybody is constantly looking out for number one. Once an actor gets there, they’ll occasionally use their newfound clout to pull a few strings and do a favour for a buddy, an opportunity Snipes seized.
Neither he nor Harrelson had quite broken through in the early 1990s, with the latter still trying to distance himself from his breakout role as Cheers bartender Woody Boyd, and the former still trying to establish himself as a leading man, despite impressive turns in films like Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City and Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever.
The pair had been friends for years already, having met on the set of 1986’s Wildcats, which marked each man’s first credited role in a feature. When writer and director Ron Shelton was putting the pieces together for his soon-to-be cult favourite sports comedy, White Men Can’t Jump, Snipes was the first of the two leads to be hired.
One of the main reasons he’d been enlisted to play Syd Deane was on Harrelson’s recommendation, with the actor informing Shelton during the audition process that he was the real deal: “I told Ron that Wes was the man, because when we were doing Wildcats, he would stand there in his football gear and do Shakespeare. It would just blow me away.”
After Snipes had secured the part, he was hoping that Harrelson would get the gig as his opposite number, Billy Hoyle. To help nudge Shelton in the same direction, he decided that he would intentionally sandbag a fresh-faced Keanu Reeves, who read scenes in the hopes of making White Men Can’t Jump his first major role since Point Break.
“He would improvise and say something where there would be a natural response from me,” Snipes told Entertainment Weekly. “And I just left him out there like dirty laundry.” Having completed his act of sabotage in Harrelson’s name, once he passed Shelton’s test on the basketball court to prove he wouldn’t look out of place onscreen, the part was his.
Regardless of Snipes’ sabotage, Harrelson was the right guy. After all, one of the main reasons why White Men Can’t Jump was so successful, recouping its budget more than three times over at the box office and becoming one of the most popular sports comedies of its era, was because of the effortless chemistry between the central pairing.
As far as he was concerned, Snipes couldn’t recreate that chemistry with Reeves, no matter how hard he tried, not that he did when he admitted to hanging him out to dry so that Harrelson would edge closer toward the top of the list, but it’s hard to say he didn’t make the correct call.
