Music plays a pivotal role in the classic Bill & Ted movies. It turns out, they always hoped to snag a guitar great for the flicks.
Actor Alex Winter, who played Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the films alongside Keanu Reeves’ Ted “Theodore” Logan, revealed their dream was to get Eddie Van Halen in a film, and it almost happened in the series’ third installment.
“We asked Eddie to be in every single movie and every single movie he said ‘no,’” Winter revealed on the Paltrocast with Darren Paltrowitz podcast, but that almost changed with 2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music.
“We went to Eddie, and we were like, ‘Would you please, please be in the third movie?’ He’s like, ‘You know what you guys, this one I would have done,’ but he was dying at that point. He was already quite sick,” Winter says. “He didn’t tell us that he was literally gonna pass, but he was like, ‘I’m not well and I can’t do it.’ But I really appreciate these films. We all love them. And if I wasn’t sick, I would absolutely come down to New Orleans and shoot this with you.”
Face the Music came out in August of 2020; Van Halen passed away that October.
The film was able to land another famous rocker for the cameo: Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, with Alex noting his whole sequence was “supposed to be [at Eddie] Van Halen’s house.”
Winter adds, “So it had kind of a bittersweet end. But it was a running joke in Bill & Ted amongst the little family of ours that every single movie we would be like knocking on Eddie’s door, and he’d be like ‘no’ and slamming the door in our face, so it was not for lack of trying.”
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