When you’re a young actor beginning to make a bit of headway in Hollywood, you might be tempted to look ahead at what your career could be five years from now and strategize with your agent to target roles in the types of films that best showcase your talents. Perhaps you come alive in romantic comedies. Maybe you’re ideal as a hissable heavy. It’s possible you’re the Laurence Olivier of grease-stained ex-con mechanics who get harassed by detectives while toiling away at the undercarriage of a car. You might know where you’re headed, but you don’t want to cut off opportunities before you’re booking steady work.
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Consider the career of Russell Johnson. The man who would be Professor Roy Hinkley on “Gilligan’s Island” survived getting shot down by the Japanese military during World War II before seeking fame and fortune as an actor in Hollywood. He had every right to believe he was playing with house money for the rest of his life, but if he was serious about becoming a working actor, he had to keep his options open. In the 1950s, Johnson probably found his greatest big-screen success in B-movie genre classics like “This Island Earth,” “Attack of the Crab Monsters,” and “Rock All Night.” He was a handsome fellow with an easy way about him, but at a certain point, it was obvious he wasn’t on the leading man track. By the time the 1960s rolled around, he was pretty clearly a television actor.
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Back then, if you wanted to catch on with a long-running TV series, it didn’t hurt to know your way around a Western set. Could you amble? Did you look fetching in a cowboy hat? Were you comfortable astride a horse? Russell could answer yes to two of these questions, but one element of Westerns was a no-go for the actor, which is why he found himself (successfully) washed up on “Gilligan’s Island.”
The Professor despised horses
In an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News (transcribed by MeTV), Johnson, who seemed to be such a mild-mannered guy as the Professor, revealed that he was pretty much un-castable in Westerns because he despised horses. This wasn’t a case of equinophobia (a condition that afflicts Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and former Kansas City Chiefs safety Eric Berry); Johnson just had it out for the four-legged oat-munchers. What was his damage? As he told the Daily News:
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“I’ve always hated horses. I tried to convince the producer that I would be the only U.S. Marshal in a TV Western who didn’t ride a horse — who always walked in pursuit of the bad guys. He wouldn’t listen to me, however, and I was stuck on a horse.”
Johnson acted in numerous film Westerns and starred as Marshal Gib Scott on the short-lived network series “Black Saddle.” This was apparently enough to turn him off horses for good. “I think maybe that’s why I’m so happy with ‘Gilligan’s Island,'” he said. “I hate Westerns because of the horses who hate me.” Johnson died in 2014 at the age of 89. If he wound up softening his views on these magnificent creatures, this change of heart was never publicly voiced.
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