AVC: Dennis Miller isn’t exactly renowned for his acting. How was he to work with? Did you get the feeling he was trying to take it seriously?
CF: Not at all. Dennis Miller was the biggest dick I’ve ever worked with in the history of my career. He was terrible to the crew, treated people like shit, very disrespectful, very snobby. People would say “good morning” to him, and he would just ignore them or walk past them and grunt or something. He was just very rude. Actually, we got in a fight because of the way he was treating people; I couldn’t stand to watch it. When I’m on a set, I feel like we’re all there together, we’re a team, we’re there working as a family, and no one person is higher than another. They always do the star trip, like, “This star’s got the bigger trailer, that star’s got more assistants,” or whatever, but to me that’s all just a bunch of ego bullshit, and I don’t buy into it. I don’t play that whole game. For me, as long as I’ve got nice quarters to relax in between shots… We’re all there to work, so it’s a dig-in-and-put-your-nose-to-the-grindstone kind of thing. And Dennis Miller was the opposite of that.
He literally was not only just rude and disrespectful to everybody, but he was doing crazy things like… I remember one day he stole a van from the transportation department in Vancouver and just decided to take off and drive around because he didn’t feel like being on the set anymore. Now, anybody who knows anything about the movie industry knows, “Don’t fuck with the Teamsters.” [Laughs.] You can do anything you want, but don’t fuck with the Teamsters. And that’s exactly what he did. I could go on and on about it, but the bottom line is that I was a huge fan of Dennis Miller’s when I took that project on, I was very excited about the opportunity to work with him, and it was really my first lesson in learning that it’s sometimes best to leave people on the screen. When you get to meet them and get to know them and find out who they really are, it’s very disheartening. Dennis Miller was definitely my slap in the face to that cold, hard reality.
The other thing was that when he went out there to promote the film, he didn’t even do good by the promotion. He literally went on the late-night talk shows and said, “Don’t go see this film, because it sucks!” I mean, he killed the box office singlehandedly. But the movie itself I actually really enjoyed. I thought that Angie [Everhart] was great, Erika Eleniak was great, Chris Sarandon was great. There were a lot of great actors, which definitely gave it the support that Dennis was lacking. And the film overall, the writing, the direction… Gilbert Adler did a great job directing it. I thought it was very funny. I love the Tales From The Crypt franchise because, again, it’s the comedy-horror thing which I think works so well. I really enjoyed doing the episodic version, the television series. And I think I would’ve had a lot more fun doing that film if anybody else was playing the lead role.
Yeah; Dennis Miller was going full Entitled Republican …. I guess it’s not surprising he hid behind Fox
