John Waynewas the ultimate good guy throughout his entire career, working in Westerns and war movies thanks to the advice of one co-star’s mother. Wayne earned his spot inWesterns thanks to John Ford, who cast him in a role inStagecoach, and he remained an iconic cowboy hero for decades. However, at one point in his career,Wayne considered playing bad guy rolesbut had someone close to him put him in his place.
John Wayne took on a role with more shades of gray than normal when heappeared in the movieThe Shepherd of the Hills,directed by Henry Hathaway. The two worked together later in the WesternTrue Grit, which sawWayne in another role where he wasn’t a pure white-hat good guy. While Wayne played a few more of these characters, he said when shooting the first movie that he might want to play against type, and his co-star’s mother explained why that was a terrible idea.
The Advice That Convinced John Wayne To Never Play A True Villain
Harry Carey Jr.’s Mom Set Wayne Straight
InThe Shepherd of the Hills,John Wayne worked with Harry Carey. Jr.This wasone of 11 films in which the two men worked together. Here, Carey was one of the main leads alongside The Duke. In the film, Carey played Daniel Howitt, a man who moved to a small mountain community and met a young cowboy named Matt (Wayne). Matt was an angry young man who wanted vengeance on his father, who he never met and blamed for his mother’s premature death.
Wayne is not a villain here, but he is someone who wants to kill his father. When the movie shows that Daniel is Matt’s father, and it made Daniel the sympathetic character in the film, it gave Wayne the first big chance of his career to play someone who was not an actual good guy. This dynamic made Wayne interested in testing the water in more movies.
Harry Carey Jr.’s mother, Olive Carey, took Wayne aside and delivered some advice.
In the Scott Allen Nollen bookThree Bad Men: John Ford, John Wayne, Wade Bond, the author shares a story about Wayne talking to actors duringThe Shepherd of the Hillsabout branching out and trying other roles. He said he didn’t want to be typecast in Western roles like this as a white-hat good guy. After the other actors left, Harry Carey Jr.’s mother, Olive Carey, took Wayne aside and delivered some advice to him:
“You big, stupid son of a b*tch. Would you like to see Harry do all these things you were telling these people? People have accepted you. They’ve taken you into their homes and their hearts now, and they like you as a certain kind of man.”
John Wayne smartly took this advice to heart. The next year, he took on some drama roles, but also delivered two Westerns and two war movies, and he ended up remaining entrenched as a hero to the moviegoers who had fallen in love with his tough, rugged style.
While John Wayne avoided villain roles throughout his career,The Shepherd of the Hillswasn’t his last time to play a morally gray character in a Western movie. As mentioned, he worked years later with Henry Hathaway again inTrue Grit,where Wayne was the hero, but he wasn’t a good man. That wasn’t even Wayne at his darkest.
His two darkest roles easily came in Westerns he made with John Ford. While Ford made Wayne the ultimate good guy cowboy in most of their movie collaborations, he also helped him deliver some dark roles in bothRed RiverandThe Searchers.InRed River, Wayne played a vindictive Western antiherowho killed deserters and even set out to kill his own adopted son just for disobeying his orders.
John Waynewas even worse inThe Searchers.In this movie, he sets out to find his niece, who a Comanche tribe had kidnapped years earlier. However, he isn’t planning to save her. He plans to kill her because he feels it is better to be dead than to be married to a Comanche. He even shoots a dead Native American in the eyes because he feels it will prevent them from their afterlife. It was the only purely racist role thatJohn Wayneever played.
