November 21st was the 30th anniversary of the release of PREDATOR 2 (watch it HERE), and to mark the occasion director Stephen Hopkins sat down for an interview with Howard Gorman of Scream Magazine. Video of their 15 minute chat is embedded below, and there's some interesting information to be found in there: including Hopkins saying that Steven Seagal – whose career as an action star was just getting started at that time – was "desperate" to star in the film.
The first PREDATOR starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, and PREDATOR 2 lost some viewers as soon as it was announced that Schwarzenegger wasn't in the sequel. He was supposed to be, though. During his conversation with Gorman, Hopkins said the sequel was supposed to be a team-up between Schwarzenegger's character and the LAPD detective that ended up being played by Danny Glover. Before Glover was cast, Patrick Swayze was brought up as a casting option, and Hopkins even had a meeting with Seagal. Hopkins said,
Seagal was on board, and I had to go have a meeting with him at his house, which was one of the craziest afternoons I've had, sort of to talk him out of doing it. It was a bizarre — he's a very unusual, slightly twisted kind of guy, and in the end I couldn't see myself doing it with him. It didn't feel right. He wasn't the kind of hero… I thought it would just turn into a cheesy — you know, it's got plenty of cheese now, but it's a kind of cool cheese, I think, as opposed to uncool cheese.
He was desperate to do it. I went up to his house, he crushed my hand and he took me into a room where all the walls were covered with guns. He told me he wanted to play a CIA psychiatrist who is also a martial arts expert and carried a gun. I listened to him for a long time, and he was clearly a little crazy at the time. I said, 'Oh, this is different from the way we were going, so I guess we shouldn't do it.' Then he became really keen to do it, and he threw his arm around me on the way out and he said, 'I want you to come to my ranch in Santa Barbara because I've got a grenade launching range there, so we can go and launch grenades together.' I said, 'Yeah, great, we'll do that.' But that didn't happen. Sorry, I'm not a fan of his, so…"
Hopkins also met with Schwarzenegger and feels they got along okay, but Schwarzenegger dropped out of the project at the last second. Hopkins theorizes that it may have been because James Cameron didn't want him to make PREDATOR 2 when they were gearing up for TERMINATOR 2.
Hopkins describes what the opening scene would have been if Schwarzenegger had been in the movie, and goes on to reveal other details about the production, so the full conversation between him and Gorman is definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of this under-appreciated sequel.
I like PREDATOR 2 the way it turned out, I'm glad we have that movie as it is, but I also have to say, I would have loved to see a different PREDATOR sequel get made in the first half of the '90s with Seagal in the lead. It would have been fun to see Seagal fight a Predator in his prime.