Mickey Rourke & Ving Rhames Both Almost Stole Kurt Russell's Death Proof Role
For cinephiles who came of moviegoing age during the 1970s and/or '80s, there is a shortlist of movie stars that, if you were talented and fortunate enough to become a filmmaker of some renown, you'd give anything to direct. And if you grew up with a hankering for horror and science-fiction flicks (which, given the rise of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Carpenter, was a near certainty), the name Kurt Russell was probably at or near the top of that list.
Russell wasn't always one of the cool kids. In fact, he was a literally uncool kid for Disney as the teenage star of family comedies like "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes." Indeed, no one viewed Russell as a grown-up actor until he impressed in the title role of Carpenter's 1979 TV movie "Elvis." This did the trick. Two years later, Russell slipped under the scaly skin of laconic scoundrel Snake Plissken in Carpenter's dystopian actioner "Escape from New York." Then he went the Eastwood-esque route again as the frosty R.J. MacReady in Carpenter's "The Thing." Carpenter clearly suited Russell, and they weren't done with each other yet.
After courting critical respectability in Mike Nichols' "Silkwood" and Jonathan Demme's "Swing Shift," he hooked up with Carpenter to star as Jack Burton, the buffoonish flipside to Snake Plissken, in "Big Trouble in Little China." Though this film (and "The Thing") fell short commercially, Gen X movie lovers knew they'd found one of their guys.
So, when one of our own, former video store clerk Quentin Tarantino, became the hottest filmmaker in Hollywood, it felt like only a matter of time before he threw up the Kurt signal. He eventually did with 2007's "Death Proof," but in classic QT fashion, he wanted to explore a different facet of the star's persona. And if Russell couldn't deliver, he had other big-name options for the role.
A Rourke/Rhames stew with a dash of William Smith
In a 2007 interview with The Quentin Tarantino Archives, Russell acknowledged that he had serious competition for the part of Stuntman Mike in "Death Proof" (which was first presented to moviegoers as the second half of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's three-hour, theatrical double feature experiment "Grindhouse"). Fortunately, Russell won out over such thespian heavyweights as Mickey Rourke and Ving Rhames, but, in doing so, he used them as peripheral influences for his portrayal of the murderous stunt driver.
Also on Russell's (and Tarantino's) mind was legendary tough guy actor William Smith. Smith didn't just play tough guys, he was one. Though he began his career as a child actor, he left the business for a while to serve in the Air Force, where he got into bodybuilding and boxing (he racked up a 31-1 record as an amateur pugilist). After serving in the Korean War, Smith returned to Hollywood and began a character actor career that would last from the early 1960s until his retirement in 2014.
Russell actually worked with Smith, so he knew exactly what Tarantino was thinking, even though Smith was the furthest thing from Stuntman Mike as a real person. As Russell told QTA:
"We both agreed that William Smith could've been an interesting, what's the word, template for Stuntman Mike. If the actor, at some point in his life got to play or be Stuntman Mike. We'd all agree that he'd be perhaps our best choice."
So, how did Russell incorporate Smith, Rourke, and Rhames into his portrayal of Mike?
Kurt the coward
Stuntman Mike's arc takes a satisfying trajectory from weird guy at the bar to horrifying serial killer to, once he's bested by a fearless stuntwoman (Zoë Bell), utter coward. In getting to that surprising finale, Russell's influences fell away and something instinctual occurred. According to Russell:
"[W]e weren't thinking of William Smith doing that, we weren't thinking of Mickey Rourke doing that, we weren't thinking of Ving Rhames doing that, we weren't thinking of Kurt Russell doing that. It just happened. It just sort of started to happen as we got towards the end of the movie and I felt compelled to play more and more and more of that coward."
And it'll be more satisfying for audiences when they look back and realize his pathetic final destination wasn't that surprising at all. Per Russell:
"And yet, it makes sense. If you look at what he's done, he kills women with his car. There's two guys [who] are raggin' on him that he's listening to in the beginning, at the bar. You think, he's gonna go after them, he just lets that go."
Russell had played the clown before in "Big Trouble in Little China" and comedies like "Overboard" and "Captain Ron," but we'd never seen him whimper like a baby as he does at the conclusion of "Death Proof." Since then, he's played a different kind of bad man for Tarantino in "The Hateful Eight" and a cuckolded stunt coordinator in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." Tarantino might love Russell as much as the rest of us, but he'd rather push the star out of his comfort zone than pay direct homage to past glories. So here's hoping they team up one last time on Tarantino's as-yet-undetermined swan song... whenever that's announced.