Marlon Brando was having a little trouble on the set of his movie “The Missouri Breaks.” The year was 1975 and the legendary actor asked his costar Jack Nicholson and anyone who could hear him, “Does anybody here know how to play the mandolin?”
A 21-year-old aspiring actor named Dennis Quaid, who was on set that day but wasn’t part of the cast, raised his hand. “I know how to play,” he said.
Quaid had only been in Hollywood for a couple of months when his brother, Randy, who was cast in “Missouri Breaks,” asked him to drive his Audi to the Western-themed set in Montana so he’d have a car to drive around when he wasn’t working.
It was the younger Quaid’s first time on a movie set. Now he was going to teach Marlon Brando how to play the mandolin for a scene in a movie. There was just one problem.
“I didn’t know how to play,” Quaid told Business Insider 50 years later with his trademark grin.
“But I played guitar, so I quickly got a book of mandolin chords, and next thing you know, I got to spend an hour with him in the trailer teaching him how to play the mandolin,” Quaid continued. “I could barely say anything. I just looked at my shoes the entire time.”
Quaid soon became a fixture on set, even sitting in on the dailies, where he watched take after take of Brando and Nicholson. It was an education on the craft of acting that no teacher could ever provide, and Quaid was hooked. He was going to make acting his profession.
And did he ever. Over the next five decades, Quaid has turned in countless memorable performances, often as real-life people like the charismatic musician Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989’s “Great Balls of Fire!” the unlikely middle-aged MLB pitcher Jim Morris in 2002’s “The Rookie,” and the 40th President of the United States Ronald Reagan in the 2024 biopic “Reagan” (he also played Bill Clinton in the 2010 HBO movie “The Special Relationship”).
For his latest role in the Paramount+ series “Happy Face,” Quaid, 70, is once again embodying a real person, this time Keith Hunter Jesperson, who’s better known as the Happy Face Killer and is currently serving a life sentence at Oregon State Penitentiary. While Quaid often prefers to seek out the living people he plays, with Jesperson, he opted out.
“He’s in a hole in prison in Portland exactly where he should be, and I don’t want to give him any satisfaction or entertainment or feeling like he’s a big deal because he’s not,” Quaid said of Jesperson, who got his nickname from his habit of drawing a happy face on the letters he’d send to media and authorities.
Instead, Quaid leaned on the show’s source material, an autobiography written by Jesperson’s daughter, Melissa Moore, who realized when she was a teen that her father was the infamous killer.
While getting inside the mind of the man who killed at least eight women in the early 1990s seems like a difficult task, Quaid quickly cracked the code.
“Surprisingly, it’s very easy to play, because he doesn’t really have emotions, human emotions,” Quaid said of Jesperson. “Very shallow emotions. There’s no real self-examination with him.”
In the latest interview in BI’s Role Play series, Quaid spoke about the legendary TV show he passed on early in his career, how cocaine helped him play Jerry Lee Lewis, and regretting turning down a golf movie opposite Kevin Costner.
On almost starring in ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ and using cocaine to play Jerry Lee Lewis
Business Insider: The movie that made you a star was the 1979 coming-of-age drama “Breaking Away,” but is it true that you had already been considered to star in “The Dukes of Hazzard” when you took a meeting for “Breaking Away”?
Dennis Quaid: I actually got the part of Bo Duke, the John Snyder role. I also had this movie with Lee Majors about construction crews building high rises. So I went into this general audition with Peter Yates, the director of “Breaking Away,” and he saw me as Mike and I said, “I’m sorry but I’m already doing this other movie.”
He blocked the doorway and said, “Listen to me, young man, you have to do this movie!” And he was right. Peter Yates taught all us guys film acting and I could never thank him enough.
By 1983 you had become a big star and had three movies that came out that year: “Tough Enough,” “Jaws 3D,” and “The Right Stuff.” But it was also your first taste as an actor of experiencing public perception versus reality, right? Because not all those movies did well.
[Laughs.] “Tough Enough” came out and went [points down]. Boom. Then “Jaws 3D” was No. 1 at the box office, but I was a little embarrassed about it — not anymore. And “The Right Stuff,” I put all my marbles in that, and it came out, and it bombed. It made $2 million. It has since become a classic. That, along with “Reagan,” are my favorite movies that I’ve ever done, personally. But by the end of that year, it was a disappointment.
However, it only got better from there.
Hey, lucky guy. Lucky life.
It is true that for one year you spent 12 hours a day learning the piano to play Jerry Lee Lewis in “Great Balls of Fire!”?
Yes. I was 34 when I got that role. I had plenty of time to prepare for it, a year. I had to look like I knew what I was doing. And then there’s Jerry’s style, the shuffle. The left hand, I had to get that down and then everything else followed.
Plus, I was also on cocaine, so that made it a little simpler to be at the piano 12 hours at a time. But I’m not advocating to take cocaine to learn how to play the piano. You will wind up in a bad place.
On regretting not starring opposite Kevin Costner in ‘Tin Cup’ and never wanting to do a ‘Parent Trap’ sequel
You played Doc Holliday opposite Kevin Costner in the 1994 epic “Wyatt Earp.” What was the worst thing about going down to 139 pounds to play the outlaw?
Getting down there and then staying down there for five months. I had a doctor and a nutritionist with me.
Are you still cool with Kevin Costner?
Oh yeah.
Have you two ever talked about doing a golf movie? I know how much you love golf and he starred in “Tin Cup.”
It’s so funny, I was offered “Tin Cup,” the Don Johnson role.
How did you not take that role?
I was already doing another movie that I wanted to do. But, yeah, what was I thinking? It’s one of the best golf movies ever made.
Was there ever talk of making a sequel to “The Parent Trap” before Natasha Richardson’s passing in 2009?
There had been some talk, but it would be impossible to do now.
So you wouldn’t even discuss it now?
No, and nobody else does. I don’t think we’d have the heart for it. Maybe one day, another version will be made for another generation. We all still miss Natasha.
On playing real-life presidents and the best football movie ever made
If you’re flipping through the channels on the TV and “Any Given Sunday” and “The Rookie” are both on, which are you going to watch?
That’s a tough one. I think “Any Given Sunday” is the best football movie ever made. I really do.
Even better than “Rudy”?
Yeah, it’s so visceral. It puts you right down on the field. It’s so much about the players and what they go through and the business. It was so close that the NFL wouldn’t even endorse it. We started out with its endorsement and then we had to change the uniforms right before. [Laughs.] But I still would watch “The Rookie.” I just love that movie.
You have played two US presidents in your career, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who are two very different men. But were there any similarities in playing them?
No, because they are very different people. I knew Bill Clinton. I played golf with him. I spent a weekend at the White House and we’d talk on the telephone. He would call me out of the blue. He’s probably the smartest person that I’ve ever been around. Very magnetic and charismatic.
Reagan was like everybody. He was like my dad. He was somebody we really needed. Reagan I admire so much for what he accomplished. Reagan stuck to his guns. Clinton was able to change with the times, Reagan stuck to his guns and won the Cold War.
So what’s left for Dennis Quaid to do? We just talked about a slew of characters, each different from the next —
And that’s what makes life an adventure, you never know what’s going to come along. I have some things that our production company, Bonniedale Films, is working on that I’d like to do, and that’s what’s exciting about this era of my career, taking something from beginning to end and getting some unwarranted respect to actually get it done.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
New episodes of “Happy Face” air Thursdays on Paramount+.
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