Rising tensions on the set of “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar” almost led stars John Leguizamo and Patrick Swayze to come to blows.
“I [tweak scripts] in movies, too. That causes a lot of friction,” Leguizamo said in conversation at New York Magazine’s Vulture Festival on Saturday morning. “Patrick Swayze, the poor man, rest in peace, he was not ready for me. I wouldn’t have been ready for me.”
Leguizamo, 53, went into filming the comedy ready to give it his best sense of humor, which didn’t sit well with the late Swayze.
“The problem was I saw, ‘I’m gonna rock the hell out of this motherf–king role’ and so when I went in there I was improvising everything and Wesley [Snipes] was loving it…and the director,” Leguizamo recalled of the 1995 film. “But Patrick started getting upset.”
Tensions between the two only escalated from there, but given they were dressed in character as drag queens, the fight couldn’t be taken too seriously.
“One day he told me to shut up and I was like, ‘Make me,'” he continued. “We’re about to punch each other except I’m in hot pants and pumps and he’s dressed like Audrey Hepburn…Wesley’s like, ‘Let him go. Let him go,’ but the director stopped him.”
“We were so in character we were PMSing at the same time.”