In Hollywood, a little patience goes a long way. And for Wendie Malick, it took more than 40 years for her to finally get a chance to act opposite Harrison Ford.
The star of Dream On, Just Shoot Me!, Hot in Cleveland, and, more recently, Shrinking, popped by Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast to talk about her lengthy career. (They had tuna melts.) And it turns out that back in the early 1980s, her career almost took a much different turn.
“I did this Excedrin commercial, and Steven Spielberg used to watch a lot of commercials. That’s when he would get ideas of who he wanted to see,” she explained. (Note: this is how Alfred Hitchcock spotted Tippi Hedren, and cast her in The Birds, so if you’re gonna follow someone, follow the best!)
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Wendie Malick with the man she was destined to act with, Harrison Ford, on season two of ‘Shrinking’
“I get this call: Steven Spielberg, who I don’t think I knew who he was at that time, and this guy, George Lucas. They want you to come in to meet them. It was Valentine’s Day. I was wearing a red hoodie and red jeans with hearts all over the front and I didn’t know what I was going in there for,” she recalled. The film in question was, in fact, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“We just talked and they put me on film. We laughed and had a lovely time for, I don’t know, like, 45 minutes or something,” she added.
Malick was given some script pages and told to come back Monday for a screen test. She went home for Valentine’s Day and “got completely snookered that night,” as she put it. “I think I got stoned. I was drinking. I was just like, ‘Ahhhh! This is it!’ And then they called me, like, the next morning and said, ‘Can you go in, like, now?'”
Apparently, Spielberg and Lucas had a change of plans and had to bump up a trip to London, so it was now or never for Malick.
When Ferguson asked, “Were you hungover?” she replied, “Oh yeah.”
Malick continued, “And I wasn’t prepared. I hadn’t done anything. I was at my boyfriend’s house, I didn’t have the right clothes, I didn’t have anything, and I just really sucked at that thing. And when I saw the movie, I thought, ‘Oh, I would’ve killed in that.'”
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Steven Spielberg directing Harrison Ford and Karen Allen (not Wendie Malick) in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’
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Taking a beat, she was sure to salute the woman who ultimately got the role. “Karen [Allen]’s lovely,” she said, “but I just was really pissed off at myself. So that was the one I blew and it was really sad. I told [Shrinking costar] Harrison [Ford] that story. He goes, ‘Really?'”
Later in the episode, Malick said finally working with Ford felt really natural. In fact, she told him that he was like “an old pair of jeans.” One wonders if his response to that was another “Really?”
You can listen to Wendie Malick’s full convo with Jesse Tyler Ferguson below.
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