David Letterman Says His AIRPLANE! Audition Was Terrible, But He Left Laughing and Having Made Friends With the Crew

David Letterman is known best for his interviewing skills in his long-running Late Night With David Letterman, Late Show With David Letterman, and his most recent show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. Letterman is also a stand-up comedian, and like many others in the trade, he was encouraged to give comedic acting a try. So he auditioned for the classic 1980 comedy, Airplane!, and it didn’t go well.

An excerpt from the upcoming book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True History of Airplane! was published by Entertainment Weekly detailing the incident. Letterman was brought in to screen test for the lead role of Ted Striker, ultimately played by Robert Hays.

The film’s co-director Jeff Zucker says in the book:

“He wasn’t an actor, but he was funny. And he looked great onscreen—like, leading-man good looks. But the thing about David is, he’s just really uncomfortable with the whole idea of acting. I think it all seems too phony to him, like he’s bullshitting. It just wasn’t him.”

Letterman adds that the Airplane! team was “really nice to consider me for a film,” but he tried to warn them that he was in no way, shape or form an actor.

“I liked those guys, and when I saw the movie, it was just delightful, and I was delighted to see it knowing that I didn’t have to look at myself. Because that would’ve ruined it. If not the whole movie, it certainly would’ve ruined it for me. [In my audition], I get out there, and they had set up a cockpit for the aircraft with chairs. I had a chair, and there was another chair where the copilot would be. We did the scene once, and then they came in and gave me some notes, and then we did it maybe two more times. And I kept saying all along, ‘I can’t act, I can’t act, I can’t act,’ and then one of them came to me after the audition and said, ‘You’re right: you can’t act!’”

“It was all so good-natured that I just laughed my way back to the car,” he adds. “I never felt any sense of disappointment, because from the very beginning I told them, ‘I can’t act.’ And then I was right, and we all ended up parting as friends. So it was a good time.”

Years later, Zucker went on Letterman’s talk show and surprised him by playing a clip from his disastrous screen test.

“Whether or not he was actually blindsided, or if his staff prepared him in advance for the clip, he was a good sport about it, and looked appropriately embarrassed, playing it to big laughs,” Zucker says in the book. “Now that was acting!”

Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True History of Airplane! is available for pre-order and goes on sale on October 3rd.