Kate Capshaw Had Zero Interest In Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
Kate Capshaw's expatriate nightclub singer Wilhelmina "Willie" Scott is the red-headed stepchild among "Indiana Jones" heroines, but it's through no fault of Capshaw's. The actor spends most of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" yelling at Harrison Ford's globe-trotting archaeologist as he puts her life in imminent danger, time and time again. There's only so much anyone can do with a role like that.
Speaking about the making of "Temple of Doom" to Empire Magazine in 2008, Capshaw admitted she wasn't even interested in doing the movie when director Steven Spielberg and co-writer/producer George Lucas first approached her. "I think George and Steven had been looking for 'the girl' — by the way, even while we made the movie they always referred to her as 'the girl' — and the casting director suggested me because I had just come out to Los Angeles and there is always heat surrounding the new girl," said Capshaw.
Indeed, as /Film's Joshua Meyer recently noted in his explanation of why "The Last Crusade" is the greatest Indiana Jones film (he's right and he should say it), the women in the Indiana Jones films have always been a good representation of "where George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were at in their personal development." In the case of Willie (as Lucas mentioned in the same Empire article), Lucas has only just gotten divorced and Spielberg had recently been through a tough breakup, which showed in her characterization.
'You can't just go in and yell'
Willie being a (deliberate?) caricature of the frequently screaming damsel-in-distress archetype — see Fay Wray's Ann Darrow in the original 1933 "King Kong" for one of the more infamous examples of this sexist cliché — didn't do much to help convince Kate Capshaw to sign on for Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" follow-up. In Capshaw's words:
"At that time, I didn't 'do' sequels. And I didn't 'do' action adventure. For my screen test — with Steven, not Harrison — it was a scene between Willie and Indy where she's really hungry. It's difficult to find audition scenes when there's so much action. You can't just go in and yell."
To her credit, Capshaw displays a real knack for screwball comedy during the scenes where Willie flirtatiously matches wits with Indy in "Temple of Doom." That's not to mention her singing and dancing in the film's opening "Anything Goes" musical number at the Obi-Wan Club in Shanghai, a fabulous sequence that proved Spielberg had the skills to deliver knock-out song-and-dance sequences almost 40 years before he directed his version of "West Side Story." As for Capshaw, she would continue acting for a decade after she married Spielberg in 1991, at which point she retired and began combining her work in other fields of art with her activism.
In short, say what you will about Willie and "Temple of Doom" in general (goodness knows there's a lot to be said), but we're all the better off for Capshaw having agreed to star in it.