When Dennis Hopper ran naked into the jungle to escape World War III: “I masturbated in front of a tree”
There isn’t much about Dennis Hopper that surprises anybody, with the actor and occasional filmmaker apparently making it his life’s work to find himself knee-deep in as much insanity as possible.
The ‘New Hollywood’ era was hardly lacking in hellraisers as the paradigm shifted towards rebellion and counterculture in the late 1960s, but Hopper is nonetheless in with a very strong shout at being named as the transformative period’s most notorious party animal.
That in itself is mightily impressive considering he was competing with the likes of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, and Oliver Reed, all of whom were top-level actors who still found themselves more likely to be making the headlines for their off-camera antics.
If anything, it’s become a key part of Hopper’s mythology. History will always remember him as the maverick who worked with James Dean and John Wayne early on in his career before evolving into the unpredictable icon involved with Easy Rider, Blue Velvet, Apocalypse Now, and Speed, but getting into preposterous scrapes is every bit as important to his legend.
After all, this is the guy who reportedly snorted the ashes of a studio executive’s dead wife, got high on acid and shot a tree after mistaking it for a grizzly bear, corrupted the religious institutions of Peru, and put two bullet holes in an original Andy Warhol because the painting scared him.
With that in mind, is it really all that surprising to discover that Hopper once got so out of his mind in drugs that he stripped off his clothes and bounded naked into the jungle, convinced that it was his only way to escape the incoming threat of a global conflict that was entirely fictitious? Based on everything else he got up to, not really.
“I thought the Third World War had started,” he admitted to The Guardian of his nude detour into Mexican shrubbery. “I masturbated in front of a tree and thought I’d become a galaxy.” Not quite how most people would react to the situation, but in his own unique way, it was completely on-brand for Hopper, given his billing as one of the industry’s most infamous eccentrics.
Having finally been coaxed back into civilisation following his naked jungle jaunt, where he bashed one out in front of the foliage and convinced himself he’d evolved into something more than human, things quickly returned to normality, or at least his version of it. Just kidding, when the authorities placed him on a flight back to the United States, he hallucinated that the plane was on fire and tried to force his way out of the emergency exit in midair.
For most people, it would be remembered as the nuttiest incident they’d ever been involved with. This being Hopper, though, it was just a regular day at the office.
