How the wrong script almost cost Kurt Russell a $7m role
It’s common knowledge that Kurt Russell started his career as a child, but what’s less appreciated is that he began as a science fiction star.
One of his earliest major roles was Dexter Riley, an intrepid teenager whose various scrapes see him become a human computer and gain superhuman strength by eating cereal, among other things. The genre has followed him ever since. He starred in John Carpenter’s celebrated sci-fi horror The Thing and played Ego the Living Planet in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
Perhaps the star’s biggest contribution to the genre is appearing in Roland Emmerich’s 1994 film Stargate. Russell plays Jack O’Neil, a colonel tasked with overseeing the translation of an ancient Egyptian artefact. This leads to the discovery of the titular ‘stargate’, a device that allows people to travel great distances across the universe through the use of wormholes.
The project was make or break for Emmerich, who had made a splash on the American market with his previous film, Universal Soldier. The so-called ‘Master of Disaster’ needed this follow-up to be just as successful, but faced significant issues making the film. His actors refused to cooperate and he struggled to convey the lofty themes of the movie on screen. Before a single shot was filmed, however, he also had to fight to land the right leading man.
Russell was always Emmerich and writer Dean Devlin’s first choice for the role of O’Neil. “He would be a really great name for foreign sales since we were doing the movie independently,” Devlin told Variety. Unfortunately, the star wanted nothing to do with the project at first and rejected the part several times. “What we found out is that he had been given the wrong script,” revealed Dean, who also wrote Independence Day.
“He was given a very early draft of the script that should never have gotten out. So, when he actually saw the shooting script he went, ‘Oh, this isn’t so bad.”’
It’s not hard to see why Russell might have had worries about doing Stargate. A science fiction film in which a group of soldiers and a scientist travel through a magic portal to a different planet to fight an evil alien dressed like an extra from Doctor Who? Doesn’t scream ‘box office’ now, does it? Luckily for Russell, he decided to take the plunge and his risk paid off big time.
Personally, Mr Goldie Hawn was rewarded handsomely for his compliance. His salary was $7million, twice as much as he’d ever been paid in the past. As for the project itself, Stargate was also a nice little earner, generating almost $200m from a budget of just $55m. And that wasn’t the end of the story. Since the release of the film, the ‘Stargate’ franchise has grown larger and larger. TV shows, novels, video games, more films, people just can’t seem to get enough of the world Emmerich, Devlin, and Russell worked to create.
It’s crazy to think that the genesis of a multi-million dollar franchise was almost undone by an administrative error. If Kurt Russell hadn’t gotten his hands on the updated version of the script, who knows what would have happened.
