Bruce Willis may be the face of Die Hard now – vest, firehose, and all – but the role of John McClane wasn’t written for him.
In fact, it was first offered to a singer, not the legendary action star Willis. And not just any singer – 73-year-old Frank Sinatra.
Die Hard, the 1988 action classic that defined a genre, was originally part of a very different cinematic universe. The film was adapted from Roderick Thorp’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever, a sequel to his earlier thriller The Detective – which had been made into a 1968 film starring none other than Sinatra.
Contractually, 20th Century Fox was obliged to offer the follow-up role to Ol’ Blue Eyes, so that’s what they did.
“They were legally obligated to offer the part to Sinatra first,” screenwriter Steven E. de Souza confirmed in the Netflix documentary The Movies That Made Us.
Unsurprisingly, Sinatra declined. At 73, the idea of leaping off buildings and exchanging gunfire with terrorists was, quite sensibly, not on his agenda.
“He said ‘I’m too old and too rich to do this, and the chases in the building would have to be on Rascal scooters’”, De Souza added.
Once Sinatra was out, the studio cast its net wide. The list of actors approached reads like a who’s who of ‘80s leading men: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Burt Reynolds, Mel Gibson, Nick Nolte, Don Johnson – even MacGyver’s Richard Dean Anderson. But all of them passed.
Willis, then mostly known for his TV role in Moonlighting, wasn’t their first choice – at the time, he had one major film credit to his name, the rom-com Blind Date.
But when co-star Cybill Shepherd’s real-life pregnancy briefly shut down production on Moonlighting, Willis suddenly had an 11-week window to take on another job, and Die Hard was waiting.
“I’d already read the script for Die Hard once, but had to pass because of the show,” Willis said. “As it turns out, a miracle happened – Cybill Shepherd got pregnant and they shut down the show for 11 weeks – just the right amount of time for me to run around over at Nakatomi Tower.”
Though Willis’ casting raised eyebrows at the time, the gamble paid off. Die Hard pulled in over $140 million worldwide on a $28 million budget, turned the actor into a movie star, and launched a franchise that would span decades.
