MOVIE NEWS – John Leguizamo had his ups and downs with the martial arts expert. Plus, he’s not the only one who had a problem with Steven Seagal on a set…
Today, it’s no surprise that Steven Seagal has a bad reputation among many of his Hollywood colleagues. A well-known anecdote is when he turned down $20 million to avoid having to fight Jean-Claude Van Damme. However, today, I want to talk about a movie in which he does not appear much but still manages to abuse a co-star in it.
Executive Decision is a fast-paced action classic that is very much a child of its time – that is, the 1990s. A group of terrorists hijack a plane to use it as a weapon of mass destruction, and an elite commando led by Colonel Austin Travis (Steven Seagal) and David Grant (Kurt Russell) tries to stop them. However, despite this synopsis, the truth is that Seagal features very little.
He earned a million dollars every single day of filming
The actor finally declared that it was precisely this – the fact that you have to work a little – that lured him into the job! As well as the fact that he was paid a million dollars for each day of shooting. We don’t know how many days he spent on the set, but it was enough to have a fight with John Leguizamo that the latter never forgot. So much so that it inspired Seagal to play his despicable movie star character in The Menu, which is available on Disney+, and I personally recommend it.
According to Leguizamo’s version, his conflict with Seagal occurred right after he began working on Executive Decision.
“I had a bad run-in with him. We did a movie together. It was Executive Decision. He’s kind of a horrible human. I’m playing his Master Sergeant, and we come in for rehearsals, and he comes in and says, ‘I’m in command. What I say is law. Anybody doesn’t agree?’ Who the hell talks like that, who walks into rehearsal and says crap like that? I started laughing when he Takewondo’d my ass against the brick wall. I was lying on the floor panting and wondering what it was all about.”
He disagreed with Seagal to such an extent that Leguizamo admitted that he got up early to watch the scenes where Seagal’s character was having a hard time. “I wanted to see him die on set. It was like a fantasy,” he admitted to the LA Times in 2014. The actor certainly does not have fond memories of his co-star.
The story of Seagal and Leguizamo did not end there. In fact, according to The Observer, Seagal even threatened to attack Leguizamo if they ever crossed paths on the red carpet after learning that Leguizamo mocked him in a comedy. To this, Leguizamo responded: “I don’t think he’s invited to a lot of red carpets.”
Sean Connery’s unpleasant experience with Steven Seagal
It’s not widely known, but Steven Seagal worked as a martial arts instructor and choreographer for a long time before he made it as a movie star. Sean Connery was one of the big names he had to train. His agent brought Connery and Seagal together to get the former in shape for the filming of the “unofficial James Bond movie”, Never Say Never Again. Connery was fifty-two years old at the time,e and the film included several fight scenes, so Seagal was brought in to treat him. One day, during training, Seagal broke Connery’s wrist! The anecdote is that Connery did something to anger him, and the attack was intentional, but that’s hard to believe. Connery himself liked to tell the story, but always pretending it was an accident, as for example in the interview he gave to Jay Leno back in the nineties.
“We had this training in the building where I had an apartment, and he was really very good,” Connery says, mentioning that the training was in Aikido. Connery admits he got a little cocky because “I thought I knew what I was doing. The principle is that it’s defense so its a pyramid, and I got a bit flash and I did that (holding arm outside the pyramid) and (miming a chopping motion) he broke my wrist! It was so well put together here that I still have it… broken.” Connery further told Leno that, twelve years after the incident, a doctor told him that his wrist was still broken, and he maintains that it still gives him trouble with certain movements.
It must be said that Connery didn’t seem too upset or even angry while telling the story. Seagal’s ego wasn’t as big then as it was later, so it was (probably) just an accident.
Source: Observer, Business Insider, Independent, JoBlo
