Laurence Fishburne Revealed Why He & Spike Lee Had Major Beef During “School Daze” Filming
The film School Daze was one the best movies of the 80’s era and many of the film’s actors’ careers skyrocketed into a whole ‘nother stratosphere after that the movie took off. That’s great for them, but there was one major player from that film who was NOT trying to be in anymore Spike Lee films and that player was actor Laurence Fishburne.
What most of us never knew was that he and Spike Lee figured out that they actually couldn’t stand working together during the filming of Spike Lee’s School Daze and here’s why according to what Laurence Fishburne told Sun Sentinel in a prior interview:
[Fishburne] rolls his eyes when asked about his experience with Lee. “I`m very opinionated, I have a very big ego; Spike has a very big ego, too,” he says. “I`ve been around for a long time, and I thought I knew more about what he was doing than he did. And, in some ways, I did. But it wasn`t so much that I knew more about what he did — I knew more about what I` was doing, and I made the mistake of telling him that. So we probably won`t work together for another 10 years,” Fishburne says. Chuckling, he adds, “If we work together at all.”
Well get outta here! On camera it looked like all of the actors got along great off screen because of the great chemistry they had on screen, but it sounds like it was hard for Fishburne to take direction from someone he deemed to be far less experienced than him at that time. Dang, he was right- those egos were massive on that set.
I guess Spike Lee eventually extended the peace symbol to Fishburne because he was able to get past his dislike for him when he reached out a few short years later to offer Fishburne the role of “Radio Raheem” in Do The Right Thing. Fishburne was actually Lee’s first choice before Bill Nunn, who ultimately did a phenomenal job with that character.
But Fishburne wasn’t trying to have anything to do with the movie. After he read the script he was like “Hell no!” LOL. Here’s what Laurence said about why he absolutely didn’t like the script for Do The Right Thing:
Fishburne criticized the role for not being real when he said “I’m from Brooklyn too and I didn’t grow up in that kind of Brooklyn. I didn`t like the script, and I didn`t like the part.” -via Sun Sentinel
Many actually speculated that Fishburne’s refusal was less about the role not being ‘authentically Brooklyn’ enough and more about these two factors: (1) because of his beef with Spike; and (2) because Spike Lee didn’t offer him a lead role in Do The Right Thing.
And there you have it folks. Laurence and Spike were not the best of friends on School Daze, unlike the united front their characters had as ‘cousins’ in that film, and Do The Right Thing almost had “Professor Phipps” (Fishburne’s character in Higher Learning) as the “Radio Raheem” character. Now that I think about it, it would have been really different watching “Jason Furious Styles” (Cuba Gooding Jr.’s “Daddy” in Boyz N’ The Hood) or “Morpheus” from the Matrix morph into the role of “Radio Raheem,” but I can definitely see “Dap” from School Daze pulling that character off.
All in all, both School Daze and Do The Right Thing were classics, but the stars just didn’t align for Spike Lee and Laurence Fishburne to work together on the latter. However, the late Bill Nunn played the heck out of that “Radio Raheem” character and I don’t think that either one of the films would have been the same without what Nunn or Fishburne contributed to them.
Source: Sun-Sentinel
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