WHEN Patrick Swayze finally got the chance to audition for one of his most important roles, the one in Julie Newmar’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!, he was the last in a line of actors to be offered the part.
Before him, producers wanted A-list names like Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise, Gary Oldman, Robert Downey Jr., John Cusack, Willem Dafoe and Mel Gibson. Although Swayze had long urged agents to secure him a chance, the door remained stubbornly closed to him.
One reason was that Swayze’s career was in decline in the mid-1990s. The films Father Hood and City of Joy had failed, and the glory days of hits like Hell’s Kitchen and Ghost seemed a distant memory.
However, Swayze himself believed that the reason was not only bad projects, but also the image that Hollywood had of him. “They wouldn’t even look at me because they thought I was too macho,” he later said, according to Far Out Magazine .
A film ahead of its time
Swayze was keen to play the role of Vida Boheme, a New York drag queen, in Julie Newmar’s To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!. At the time, there were almost no mainstream films featuring gay characters, and the few that did, like Philadelphia, dealt with difficult topics like AIDS. The Steven Spielberg-produced film offered something different – a fun comedy starring three drag queens.
Director Beeban Kidron had the most trouble casting Vida, the character who carries the film with her emotional monologues. Many candidates looked unnatural in drag or failed to show the sensitivity the character required.
After almost everyone else dropped out, they turned to Swayze again. “I couldn’t even get a script at first. It wasn’t until they exhausted all other options that they let me in,” he recalled. He got the script just hours before the audition, so he didn’t have time to learn it. Instead, he decided to improvise.
“I told them, ‘If I have to say this line, we can forget about all of this. But if you let me give you a half-hour monologue about what it’s like to be a drag queen, you’ll see if I can turn into Vida while looking in the mirror.'”
Kidron was speechless as Swayze delivered an impromptu monologue for nearly an hour, inspired by his own upbringing in Texas. “When I finished, I looked at them – they were all crying,” he later recalled. It was then that he got the role.
It was also crucial for the director that the actor, who everyone considered too masculine, looked convincing and natural in drag. “I don’t think the film would have worked if Vida hadn’t looked beautiful,” she concluded with a laugh.
Leave a Reply