“I love him,” Leguizamo prefaced his comments, before opening up about his experience working with Swayze on ‘To Wong Foo.’
John Leguizamo is opening up about working with the late Patrick Swayze on the 1995 film, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
During an appearance on Thursday’s episode of SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, the actor detailed his “difficult” relationship with Swayze, sharing why he didn’t have a totally pleasant experience starring alongside late actor on the road trip comedy, in which they played drag queens alongside Wesley Snipes.
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“AlI I hear about Patrick Swayze is just what an absolute angel he was,” Andy Cohen said, after bringing up To Wong Fo, to which Leguizamo replied, “That’s different than what I experienced.”
“He was just, rest in peace. I love him,” Leguizamo said of Swayze, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2009. “He was just neurotic … I’m neurotic too, but I don’t know. He was just, it was difficult working with him.”
When Cohen asked if Swayze was a “perfectionist,” Leguizamo said, “I don’t know. Just neurotic. I think maybe a tiny bit insecure.”
“Wesley [Snipes] and I … we vibed because, you know, we’re people of color, and you know, we got each other,” he continued. “I’m also an improviser and he didn’t like that. He couldn’t keep up with it and it would make him mad and upset sometimes.”
“He’d be like, ‘Are you gonna say a line like that?’ I’d go, ‘You know me. I’m gonna do me. I’m gonna just keep making up lines,'” Leguizamo added. “He goes, ‘Well, can you just say the line the way it is?’ I go, ‘I can’t,’ and the director didn’t want me to.”
After Cohen noted that it appeared that Leguizamo and Swayze “approached the work differently,” Leguizamo agreed. “Way differently,” he said. “I invented my role. I rewrote that role. I expanded that role because that role was nothing.”
In the comedy, Leguizamo, Swayze, and Snipes, star as drag queens who embark on a cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles.
Leguizamo shared that the film was a “very important” movie, to which Cohen agreed, saying To Wong Foo was “before its time.”
“It was very important because a lot of transgender kids, LGBTQ+ kids, come up to me who are now, I guess, a little older, but they said because of that [movie] and my character, they felt confident to come out to their parents,” Leguizamo recalled. “And I felt like, Wow … that’s what art’s supposed to do. Art’s supposed to give people courage. Art is supposed to teach people empathy. That’s what art — that’s what I got in the business for.”
The movie is streaming now on Tubi.
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