Vincent D’Onofrio had an unpleasant experience shooting “Men in Black” – but Edgar the Bug got the last word.
While talking with GQ about his filmography, the “Daredevil: Born Again” star remembered the rollercoaster experience he had working on “Men in Black.” D’Onofrio played Edgar, a farmer who was overtaken by a villainous enemy, and was approached about the part by one of the film’s producers who pitched him the movie with an interesting ask from director Barry Sonnenfeld.
“’But he’s asked me to ask you that if I’m going to give you the script that I have to promise’ — and this is the absolute truth and Barry and I have talked about it since — ‘I would have to promise that I would never speak to him about acting or the character or anything that had to do with my performance,’ ” D’Onofrio remembered. “‘That I would just say yes and then I would just do it.’”
D’Onofrio took the part and set about figuring out how to play the oddball villain without talking about it with Sonnenfeld. Eventually, he set on getting fitted for leg braces to hamper his walking and better portray an alien learning to control a human body. With the walk and the talk settled, D’Onofrio’s first day on set arrived and his opening moments got off to a rocky start.
“I’m doing the first scene, which took place in a barn,” D’Onofrio said. “Now remember, Barry has no idea what I’m going to do. Cause I wasn’t allowed to discuss it with him. I promised I wouldn’t. So, I start this monologue, and I walk in, and I get halfway through, and Barry calls cut … The first AD turned with this microphone and said, ‘Barry would like to clear the set.’ So, you know, I started to walk off, and then I heard, ‘Not you, Vincent.’ Okay. I could be getting fired. We’ll see.”
Sonnenfeld had him try again once the set was cleared. It did not go much better.
“He cut at the same place again. And he goes, ‘Are you going to do that the whole time?’ That’s what he said,” D’Onofrio recalled. “And I said to him, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty much my plan. Like, I don’t have a plan B. Like, this really is it.’”
“‘My god, this is horrible. It’s horrible,’” the actor remembered the director saying before offering to alter his performance. “He just kept shaking his head and he said, ‘But let’s continue and see what happens.’”
The performance ended up working. D’Onofrio’s turn as Edgar became one of the more lasting and memorable aspects of the beloved sci-fi film also starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. The movie went on to make over $580 million at the box office and sparked a slew of sequels – though none captured the magic of the original.
