Peter Weir’s 1998 film “The Truman Show” was ahead of its time. The film tapped into a common paranoid fantasy born of the ultra-saturated media age, increasingly interested in “reality television.” What if, the movie asked, you were being filmed by hidden TV cameras 24 hours a day, and your life was being broadcast around the world for an eager viewing public? By extension, what if all the people you meet are paid actors, only pretending to be your friends and lovers, inserted into your “show” for dramatic purposes? All life is now public, and it’s being used as fodder for entertainment. “The Truman Show” was an existential crisis for the MTV generation, and the original script was even darker if you can believe it.
“The Truman Show” imagined such a scenario, with one Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) at its center. Truman was adopted by a TV company at birth, and raised inside a city-sized bubble by actors who pretended to be his parents, and then later, his friends and girlfriends. Now in adulthood, Truman is beginning to suspect something is amiss about his life, and curious events begin happening. A rain cloud rains only on him, for instance. A TV spotlight crashes to the ground out of the sky. His friends are behaving erratically. Truman is finally beginning to suspect his life is being staged.
The director of Truman’s life is a gentle artiste named Christo (Ed Harris) who has been calmly manipulating Truman’s life from the beginning. Christo is kind of like God to Truman … and he seems to feel that way a little as well. He struggles to retain control as his creation slowly develops free will.
Back in 2001, a website called the Sabotage Times talked to a Hollywood legend who was initially cast as Christo, but who was fired by Peter Weir after only two days. Ed Harris was this legend’s replacement, it seems. The actor in question never learned why he was canned, and the firing bruised his ego.
The legend was Dennis Hopper.
Dennis Hopper was originally cast as Christo in ‘The Truman Show’
Hopper revealed that he was fired from “The Truman Show” for reasons he was never able to accurately determine. It seems, however, that neither director Peter Weir nor producer Scott Rudin, were very fond of his performance. It seems that Hopper wasn’t doing anything wrong, but Weir and Rudin certainly didn’t like it. It wasn’t until later that Hopper learned he was kind of on probation the entire time. He said:
“Scott Rudin, the producer, had made an agreement with the director that … He didn’t want me to do the part, and if he didn’t like what I did after the first day’s dailies then he would fire me. And they fired me.”
When asked if Hopper’s firing might be based in anything personal, the actor could only say “I guess, obviously. But what, I don’t know. I don’t even know the man.” He also said that losing the job was a “major blow,” adding that he has “gone and really researched the part. It was really an unfortunate situation.” It was curious, as well, that Weird and Rudin didn’t have an understudy in mind; after Hopper was fired, the pair began searching for a new Christo. This was according to a 1997 article in Variety, printed during the film’s production. That article also cited the traditional catch-all for firings: “creative differences.”
But Hopper would get his due. In 1999, Ron Howard made a very similar film to “The Truman Show” called “EDtv” wherein the title character, Ed (Matthew McConaughey) agreed to be a 24-hour-a-day TV star, only to quickly learn that he cherished his privacy. Hopper played Ed’s estranged father, Hank, able to reconnect with his son and his ex-wife thanks to Ed’s newfound fame. It wasn’t the God character, but Hopper did get to make a late-‘90s reality TV satire after all.
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