Patrick Swayze's widow reflects on 'Ghost': 'He had to fight for that role'
Thanks to rock ‘em sock ‘em hits like Red Dawn and Road House, Patrick Swayze was one of the biggest action stars of the 1980s until a little movie called Ghost put him in touch with his sensitive side. Jerry Zucker’s unlikely romantic blockbuster casts Swayze as Sam Wheat, whose life is tragically cut short by a mugger’s bullet. Fortunately, he’s able to delay his trip to the afterlife in order to protect his one true love, Molly (Demi Moore). Released in the summer of 1990, Ghost quickly became Swayze’s highest-grossing film, earning over $200 million. (The actor died of pancreatic cancer in 2009.) But as the actor’s real-life true love, Lisa Niemi, tells Yahoo Entertainment, it wasn’t a movie he was destined to get. “He had to fight for that role,” she remembers. (Watch our interview above.)
As Niemi tells it, she had to fight for Swayze to read the Ghost script in the first place. “Patrick was always terrible about reading scripts,” she says. “I kept begging him! I said, ‘You have to read this. You’re gonna love it.’” Part of his reluctance may have been the fact that Ghost had already been rejected by a number of Hollywood’s A-list leading men. Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment earlier this year, Zucker revealed that Harrison Ford was at the top of his original list to play Sam. “The studio wanted Harrison Ford in this so badly, and I did, too. I loved Harrison Ford. They took him out to lunch, and he was very honest about it. He said, ‘Why are you making this? Is it a comedy? Is it a tragedy? It’s very weird.’ And a lot of people thought that, he was certainly not the only one that didn’t see how it was going to mix.”
But Niemi loved the weirdness of the script, and saw how it could bring together her husband’s mixture of steeliness and sensitivity. Eventually, he broke down and read the script... and then broke down emotionally. “He read it all in one sitting; he came out with tears in his eyes, and said ‘I have to do this movie.’”
Swayze wasn’t the only member of the Ghost cast who had to prove themselves to Zucker. The director was also reluctant to cast Whoopi Goldberg as psychic Oda Mae Brown, who becomes Sam’s link with the physical world during the course of the movie. “My image of Whoopi was her comedian side,” he told us, adding that he seriously considered Tina Turner for the role instead. But Swayze felt that Goldberg — who he remembered seeing on stage in New York during his struggling actor days — was the perfect Oda Mae. “He was like, ‘We have to give her a shot at this,’” Niemi says.
Ultimately, Zucker relented when he saw Swayze and Goldberg read together. “You could just see it. For me, it’s so great to see someone just doing it. Ghost was my first drama, and I was terribly afraid of not getting it right. So I was really fortunate that Patrick and Whoopi were able to read together so that I could see it in front of me and go, ‘Yeah, that works.’” (Goldberg went on to win an Oscar for her performance, and thanked Swayze in her acceptance speech.)
According to Niemi, Ghost remained a career highlight for Swayze for the rest of his life, although he could never pick just one favorite movie from his filmography. “He loved all of them for different reasons,” she explains. “When Road House came up, he couldn’t wait to do it. He was very proud of how [Dirty Dancing] came out and the longevity it had. He always tried to make unusual choices and push the envelope on things, which is really great.”
Ghost is currently streaming on FuboTV.
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