John Leguizamo Says The 1993 SUPER MARIO BROS. Movie Cast Real Strippers and "Disney Was Not Happy"
John Leguizamo is offering some more fascinating insight into the crazy-ass 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie that he starred in. The actor played Luigi in the film alongside Bob Hoskins as Mario, and we’ve heard a ton of crazy stories about the production of this movie.
As you know, the original Mario Bros. movie was a much darker version of the story than fans were expecting, and Disney certainly wasn’t happy with it. During an interview with GQ, Leguizamo shared one thing I had never heard before, and that was that the filmmakers cast real strippers in the film!
“[The directors] had this dark, dark vision that Disney was not okay with so there was all this butt-heading that was incredible. That party scene? Those were all strippers from North Carolina that they put on the set and they had them in the most revealing clothes and costumes.”
The actor added: “Disney was not happy. They had to cut a lot of it, blow it out, CGI it with whatever bad technology they had back in the day.”
The 1993 live-action movie was helmed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, and their career crashed and burned even before their movie was released because of how nightmarish of a production this project was. There are a lot of different factors that went into the film’s failures, but a lot of blame is cast on the directors. This is just another wild story to add to the list.
The movie was so disliked that Nintendo locked down any other attempts to make movies based on their properties until just recently with The Super Mario Bros. Movie.