“He had these scrapbooks that he would keep, and Danny would photograph pages of the scrapbook, [which had] the TV Guide from when The Wild One aired on TV,” Nichols says. “So we recreated that in the film.” Hardy seized on the detail, modeling Johnny’s voice around the sound of a Chicagoan suburbanite doing a Brando impression. Tellingly, too, Hardy also had a mantra he frequently muttered: “You can’t be half a gangster.”
Closer to the real thing, at least in terms of style if not crime, is Butler’s Benny, the guy so cool Kathy married him within two months. And that charisma is no put-on, according to the director.
“I think you’re about to see him play everything under the sun,” Nichols says of Butler, “because the truth is he is just a stone-cold movie star. They exist; they are real; there are not a lot of them, but they do walk on this earth, and he is one of them. And when he walks up and shakes your hand, you realize that you’re meeting one.” And it’s not just about handsome good looks, the filmmaker insists. “That’s a misunderstanding of what it takes to be a movie star. There’s something vibrating under their skin that makes them undeniable. Austin has it, Tom has it, Jodie has it.”
Consider the titular bike riding in the film. While Comer laments she was not allowed to ride any actual motorcycles in the film—“I didn’t even get to wear leather!” she chuckles—she vividly recalls the evening she spent on a camera rig above the Ohio River. “I was on the back of [Butler and the rig] for insurance reasons… and we were having to play this really euphoric moment, and Austin was like, ‘I feel like a fraud!’” But that’s because, by the time cameras rolled, he had mastered riding antique Harleys without a helmet. That’s pretty impressive since, as Nichols tells it, he might’ve fibbed his way into the role.
“He wasn’t forthright about it,” Nichols smiles about the first meeting where Butler claimed he has a history with bikes. “He was like, ‘Yeah, we rode Spykes on Elvis.’ But at that point I hadn’t seen it, so I was like, ‘well, that makes sense. I think Elvis rode motorcycles.’ And then [stunt coordinator Jeff Milburn] had a meeting with him and was like, ‘Yeah, that guy’s never ridden a motorcycle.’”
Nonetheless, during the months Butler spent filming his Dune: Part Two scenes in Budapest, he would sneak off every day to practice on a Harley. This continued until it was time to show up in Cincinnati on top of a vintage bike with engineering so antiquated that experts now refer to those models as “suicide shifters.” (Some cast mates were advised not to ride at all.)