A fun little snippet of Hollywood History today at LMO. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was massive back in the early 1990s. That bloody Brian Adams song topped the charts all over the world, while millions of ladies swooned over Hollywood’s leading man of the time, Kevin Costner, who was so damn famous he didn’t need to bother with losing his American accent.
Christian Slater has no such excuse. Even with the inclusion of some historical tokenism, it remains good fun, raised by a gloriously scenery-chewing turn from Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Unbelievably, it is now more than 30 years old.
One thing that really stands out is the completely unexpected (if you have never seen it) appearance of the great Sean Connery in the closing scene, portraying King Richard returning from the Crusades.
The completely unmarketed and uncredited cameo took cinema goers by surprise, but how did it happen?
It wasn’t always going to be Connery in that part. Originally they planned to have Monty Python’s John Cleese in the role. However, it was screenwriter and producer Pen Densham who wanted Connery in the role instead of using a comedian as King Richard.
Densham said of Cleese:
“I couldn’t stomach that because I felt all of the care, all of the investment, all the love, all the effort that the characters were playing all came down to a joke.”
So he took it on himself to contact Connery’s agent. Densham continued:
“Passion empowers you, whereas technique doesn’t. I so wanted to not have the John Cleese that I said, ‘Would you give me Sean Connery? We can’t give him a credit because you can’t have the audience waiting for the whole movie to see him — but he only has to work one day.”’
Connery’s agent, CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz, agreed but requested a fee of $1 million. Densham told him:
“No. No. You don’t understand, we’re already over budget. We can’t afford that, but I guarantee you that it will be a part of film history.”
In the end, Connery agreed to play the part for $250,000, which would be donated to a Scottish hospital and Connery returned to the world of Robin Hood for the first time since he played an aging Robin opposite Audrey Hepburn in 1976’s Robin and Marian.
Connery had already appeared alongside Cleese in Terry Gillam’s 1981 film Time Bandits, when Cleese played… Robin Hood.