'Commando' at 35: Director Mark Lester reveals why an interracial love scene was cut from Arnold Schwarzenegger's action
Arnold Scwharzenegger was already an internationally-recognized celebrity by the mid-1980s, but Hollywood’s Schwarzenegger Era officially began 35 years ago on Oct. 4, 1985 with the release of Commando. Directed by Mark Lester, the lean, mean action movie awarded the Austrian bodybuilder his first starring role that didn’t involve him playing a sword-swinging barbarian or a killer robot from the future. Instead, Schwarzenegger played contemporary super-soldier, John Matrix, who embarks on a bloody mission to rescue his kidnapped daughter, Jenny (12-year-old Alyssa Milano), from the clutches of mercenaries led by an old ally-turned-adversary, Bennett (Vernon Wells).
Filled with one-liners and over-the-top action set-pieces, Commando set the tone for so many of the action favorites its star would make throughout the ’80s and ’90s, from Predator and The Running Man to True Lies and Eraser. “Arnold was already a larger-than-life character, and the producer, Joel Silver, kept saying, ‘Remember, more ER, ER,’” Lester tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I said, ‘What’s that?’ And he said, ‘Exaggerated reality!’ It was a great, great shoot and a great movie.”
But there was one instance where actual reality got in the way of the fun. In the script — which was initially penned by Teen Wolf collaborators Jeph Loeb and Matthew Weisman, and then heavily re-written by Steven E. de Souza — Matrix was supposed to take a time out from adding to his body count to enjoy a love scene with Cindy, the civilian flight attendant who inadvertently gets caught up in the commando’s mission. (Matrix is a widower in the film, although it’s never specified how his wife passed on. “I don't know what happened to his wife,” Lester says, laughing. “That's a good question. I don't know what happened.”) Originally written for a white actress, the role eventually went to rising star Rae Dawn Chong. “We had forty white actresses — including Sharon Stone and all the usual suspects — read for the part, but she was the best one,” Lester remembers. “She was the most comedic, and did the best reading. We were way ahead of our time in that way.”
Even as the producers and executives at 20th Century Fox signed off on Chong’s casting, they promptly pumped the brakes on the scene where John and Cindy would have gotten intimate while on a flight to rescue Matrix’s daughter. “They were afraid that Southern theaters and drive-ins wouldn’t play the film, because we had a Black woman and a white man,” the director says now, adding that both Schwarzenegger and Chong had no qualms about performing the scene. “There was no real nudity or anything; they were just going to be making out. This was only 35 years ago, so it shows you how times have changed.”
The studio also came up with a movie-specific excuse to abandon plans for an interracial love scene, arguing that at that moment in the story, Matrix had more important things on his mind than making out. “They said, ‘He’s on his way to save his daughter — why is he taking time to make love to this woman? It’s not going to make him look very good.’” Lester recalls, “They were probably right about that, but I think it was more about the interracial aspect at that time.” With that scene lost, the director ensured that the final moments of the movie hinted at a happily every after for the couple. “It’s intimated that they’re going to end up together,” Lester says of the closing scene, which shows a reunited John and Jenny getting on a plane with Cindy, all three of them grinning from ear-to-ear.
Interestingly, there is a love story that remains in the film. Early on in production, Lester gave Wells some insight into what motivates Bennett to make Matrix’s life hell. “I told him, ‘You’ve got to play it like you hate him, but also that you love him,’” the director says. “You’re so in awe of him that you’ve got to kill him.” The actor took that note and ran with it, embedding a layer of homoerotic tension into the film that audiences still pick up on today, although Lester swears he didn’t notice it during production. “Everybody has said that since, but I never picked up on it. I did direct him like that, though, so I guess it came through!”
Although Commando employed a full stunt team, the star was insistent that he do all his own stunts for one simple reason: no body double could match his particular body. “At the time, he was in peak form,” Lester says of the world’s most famous muscleman. “He never believed that a stunt person could have a body like his, and then his fans would know it wasn’t his body.” And Lester’s camera captured every bulging bicep in an effort to persuade the audience that Matrix — and Schwarzenegger — was a real-life superhero.
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