When Patrick Swayze kept “scaring the shit” out of a director with dynamite
When Patrick Swayze died in 2009, the movie world mourned the loss of someone who was handsome, talented, charming, funny, and embodied almost every aspect of what it meant to be a big-name actor.
Even now, with almost two decades of hindsight, he is still treated with the utmost respect to the point where he has passed into almost sainthood, his films still watched by millions. That being said, he could be a right pain in the ass sometimes.
Being an alcoholic, the Road House star wasn’t always the easiest to be around as his mood could turn foul at a moment’s notice, but perhaps his worst habit was his penchant for playing pranks. While working on Dirty Dancing, despite their sizzling chemistry onscreen, he had to tearfully apologise to Jennifer Grey after making her life a living hell, and you can safely say the pair did not get on in real life.
However, the person who arguably suffered the most from Swayze’s antics was director John Milius, who would surprisingly go on to co-found the UFC and supposedly inspired the character of Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. He worked with the actor on the 1984 film Red Dawn, and being one of Swayze’s earliest movie roles, you’d think he’d have taken it seriously. Well, not really, according to his memoir The Time of My Life, which was co-written with his wife Lisa Niemi, where he revealed that he almost killed Milius at the end of an extreme practical joke.
“One time, I rigged the toilet in his trailer with charges, M60s, which are like one-eighth-size sticks of dynamite,” Swayze confessed, “I packed them into a steel tube to direct the force, so they wouldn’t blow shrapnel everywhere, and taped them under his toilet. When Milius went in to do his business, I detonated them, and the explosion sent him running out the door in a panic. He’d barely gotten the words ‘Swayze, you son of a-’ out of his mouth when I set off a second round of explosives, blowing two garbage cans sky-high and scaring the shit out of him.”
Red Dawn, which also starred Grey, along with Lea Thompson and Charlie Sheen, is a war movie, which would explain how Swayze was able to get his hands on the explosives. He also admitted to rigging a series of bottle rocket launchers to go off when Milius tried to open his trailer door, sending him sprawling back inside in an attempt to dodge the playful pyrotechnics.
The man attempted to justify actions by exposing the on-set conditions while making Red Dawn, which saw Milnus organise gruelling boot camps and giant games of ‘capture the flag’ to strengthen the bonds between his actors and to get them into the wartime spirit.
Thus, Swayze argued that his pranks were an attempt to lighten the mood, and naturally, nothing says relaxed and upbeat quite like being shot in the face with a bottle rocket or destroying a toilet while someone’s on it.
It should be noted that while the actor claimed Milius enjoyed not knowing what he was going to encounter next, it should also be noted that, despite Red Dawn being a hit, he never worked with the volatile jokester again.
