Roald Dahl Was Not Happy That Gene Wilder Was Cast as Willy Wonka in WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
One of my all-time favorite performances of Gene Wilder is when he played Willy Wonka in the classic 1971 film Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. He was freakin’ amazing in that movie! His comedic timing was flawless and he was just so much fun to watch! After all these years, when I watch this movie, I’m still in awe by his insane performance.
It’s crazy because Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author Rold Dahl was not happy that Gene Wilder was cast in the film! In an interview with Donald Sturrock, a friend of Dahl’s and the author of Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, he shared:
“He felt the Gene Wilder casting was wrong, His ideal casting was [surreal English comedian] Spike Milligan and he said Milligan was really up for doing it. He even shaved his beard off to do a screen test.”
The film company didn’t agree though, and Milligan obviously wasn’t cast. Dahl also thought Peter Sellers would have been a better option than Wilder, and Sellers even reached out to Dhal to ask for the role, but that didn’t work out either. Sturrock went on to say:
“I think he felt Wonka was a very British eccentric. Gene Wilder was rather too soft and didn’t have a sufficient edge. His voice is very light and he’s got that rather cherubic, sweet face. I think [Roald, below] felt…there was something wrong with [Wonka’s] soul in the movie – it just wasn’t how he imagined the lines being spoken.”
All six members of the Monty Python comedy troupe: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, also expressed interest in playing the lead role. However, they were deemed not big enough names for an international audience. Sturrock added:
"He had serious reservations about Gene Wilder's performance as Wonka, which he thought 'pretentious' and insufficiently 'gay [in the old-fashioned sense of the word] and bouncy'.”
I don’t know, I love the twisted and loving soul that Wilder brought to Wonka in the movie. Regardless of what Dahl thought, I could never imagine anyone else in the role. Johnny Depp played Wonka in Tim Burton’s adaptation of the story, but I didn’t care for his take on the character.
When the studio approached Wilder to star in the movie, he said that he’d make it under one condition… He wanted to do a somersault in the scene when he first meets the children. When asked why, the actor said that having Willy Wonka start out limping and end up somersaulting would set the tone for that character. He wanted to portray him as someone whose actions were completely unpredictable.
He even detailed the sequence where he was introduced as a crippled old man who does a front flip in a letter to the film's director. He wrote:
When I make my first entrance, I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.
The reason for this? Wilder thought that by establishing Wonka's deceptive and playful nature right off the bat, the audience wouldn’t be able to tell if he was telling the truth or lying throughout the rest of the film. That was the perfect introduction to the character!
What are your thoughts on Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka and Dahl’s reservations about him playing the character?
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