Predator 2 nearly starred Steven Seagal instead of Danny Glover

Predator 2 is a movie that we love here at JoBlo (watch this video above to see just how much). One of the reasons it works is Danny Glover, who serves as an interesting counterpoint to the brawn shown by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the original. But it turns out that he wasn’t the first choice to star in the sequel. Rather, it was none other than Steven Seagal who, in 1990, briefly left his home studio, Warner Bros, to make an action flick for 20th Century Fox.

In the end, that movie was Marked for Death, which is maybe his best non-Under Siege film, but he came close to starring in the higher-profile Predator sequel helmed by Stephen Hopkins (Patrick Swayze was also a possibility). In an interview with Howard Gorman of Scream Magazine, the director dug into how this almost happened. You can watch the full chat HERE, but here’s what he had to say:

Seagal was on board, and I had to go have a meeting with him at his house, which was one of the craziest afternoons I’ve had, sort of to talk him out of doing it. It was a bizarre — he’s a very unusual, slightly twisted kind of guy, and in the end I couldn’t see myself doing it with him. It didn’t feel right. He wasn’t the kind of hero… I thought it would just turn into a cheesy — you know, it’s got plenty of cheese now, but it’s a kind of cool cheese, I think, as opposed to uncool cheese.

He was desperate to do it. I went up to his house, he crushed my hand and he took me into a room where all the walls were covered with guns. He told me he wanted to play a CIA psychiatrist who is also a martial arts expert and carried a gun. I listened to him for a long time, and he was clearly a little crazy at the time. I said, ‘Oh, this is different from the way we were going, so I guess we shouldn’t do it.’ Then he became really keen to do it, and he threw his arm around me on the way out and he said, ‘I want you to come to my ranch in Santa Barbara because I’ve got a grenade launching range there, so we can go and launch grenades together.’ I said, ‘Yeah, great, we’ll do that.’ But that didn’t happen. Sorry, I’m not a fan of his, so…”

Hopkins also met with Schwarzenegger and feels they got along okay, but Schwarzenegger dropped out of the project at the last second. Hopkins theorizes that it may have been because James Cameron didn’t want him to make Predator 2 when they were gearing up for Terminator 2.

Hopkins describes what the opening scene would have been if Schwarzenegger had been in the movie, and goes on to reveal other details about the production, so the full conversation between him and Gorman is definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of this underappreciated sequel.

I like Predator 2 the way it turned out, but I must admit, it would have been cool to see a Predator movie in the early nineties starring Seagal in his prime.

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