This month marks the 25th anniversary of “12 Monkeys,” one of the best time-travel movies ever made, and one of Bruce Willis‘s best performances in a film, but things could have gone very differently. In a new oral history on the making of “12 Monkeys,” director Terry Gilliam reveals we could have a very different actor instead of Willis.
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The oral history comes courtesy of Inverse, where Gilliam revealed some of the other actors who could have got the role of the visitor from the future, James Cole. “The pressure was to get a movie star in. That was at a time when I was still a hot director, so people wanted to come near me and touch me,” Gilliam said. “So they were coming up with all these names. And I just kept saying no. Tom Cruise, Nic Cage, they were all being thrown at me.” That’s right, that Nicolas Cage, which would have been a very different movie, but definitely not a disinteresting one.
“I had never been a great fan of Bruce’s before,” Gilliam confessed. “But I liked talking to him, and I thought, OK, this guy’s smart; he’s funny. I explained to him my concerns about him as an actor. I hated the Trumpian mouth he does in films. Rectal. It’s like I’m looking at somebody’s asshole.”
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Despite some issues on set, where Gilliam considered Willis to be acting too much like he was in “Die Hard,” Gilliam told The Hollywood Reporter for a different oral history that he thinks Willis’s performance should have been nominated for awards. “There must have been a twinge of piss-offedness when Brad got the nomination and he didn’t,” Gilliam said. “I think Bruce should have been nominated. It’s a great performance. It’s why the movie works.”
