‘I turned down Gandhi because I’m terrified of snakes’: the amazing movie memories of Bruce Dern — SkimNews
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- Bruce Dern, 90, is set to attend the Edinburgh film festival next week for the world premiere of his latest film "Northbound," in which he plays Arthur, a man who flees a US nursing home for his childhood shack on a Canadian lake.
- Northbound was shot in Canada for about $1.6 million over 30 days during the Olympics, roughly two years ago, and is described in the interview as related to Dern's Oscar-nominated "Nebraska."
- Bruce Dern turned down a role in Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" because he is terrified of snakes; when Dern asked if a snake charmer would be waiting at his hotel steps, Attenborough replied "Probably," and Martin Sheen ended up with the part.
- Dern won Cannes best actor at 77 for Alexander Payne's "Nebraska" and returned to the festival this year for the documentary "Dernsie," named after his signature habit of improvising lines on set — including the "John Wilkes Booth?" quip he delivered to Brad Pitt in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
- Born into a wealthy Chicago family — Adlai Stevenson was his godfather and Eleanor Roosevelt babysat him — Dern was effectively disowned when he quit college to act, then trained at the Actors Studio under Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg before Kazan finally pushed him toward Hollywood in 1960.
- Bruce Dern received his first Oscar nomination for 1978's "Coming Home" and landed his first major film role in 1969's "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," a movie he says won an Oscar and then largely disappeared.
Why it matters: At 90, Bruce Dern lands another leading role with 'Northbound' premiering at Edinburgh, despite having called himself a 'second or third banana' for most of his career. The Gandhi anecdote reveals how casting decisions hinge on personal quirks — Martin Sheen inherited the part Dern walked away from over a fear of snakes — while the arthouse circuit keeps rewarding a character actor Hollywood long overlooked.
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