Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still
October 31st, 2026 · 9:07am GMT
There isn’t an actor in the world, from amateur stage productions to mega-budget blockbusters, who hasn’t played at least one role they’ll always regret. Patrick Swayze definitely had his, but on the plus side, he managed to get it out of the way early.
He made quite a few bad movies during his career, but none of them were actively disowned. He had plenty of issues with Dirty Dancing for a number of reasons, but he eventually accepted that playing Johnny Castle in the star-crossed romantic classic was the character he’d always be remembered for.
Swayze had the opportunity to chase superstardom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but that wasn’t the career he saw for himself. While he showed he could kick plenty of ass in the delightfully dumb Road House, anchor an action flick in Point Break, smoulder with the best of them in Ghost, and successfully play against type in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, he didn’t want to be pigeonholed.
For further proof, there’s his turn as motivational speaker Jim Cunningham in Donnie Darko, where that familiar charm becomes something decidedly unpleasant. Richard Kelly remembered Swayze being nervous about accepting such an unlikeable character, but willing to trust a young filmmaker with an unusual script.
It was hardly the safest way to preserve his heartthrob credentials, which was part of the appeal. Here was someone audiences had spent years swooning over, cheerfully helping to make their skin crawl instead. Whatever else could be said about his choices, Swayze wasn’t simply looking for another opportunity to flash the smile, get the girl, and leave everyone feeling thoroughly reassured.
Credit: Far Out / MGM / United Artists
It says a lot about the late star’s desire to constantly broaden his horizons that he called Allan Quartermain the role he was born to play when King Solomon’s Mines was a two-part miniseries that aired on Hallmark. He didn’t chase the money, and he wasn’t interested in the A-list, and the character he’d always been waiting for never even saw the inside of a cinema.
Swayze began his professional life as a dancer, so it was inevitable that’s how he’d start making his way in the business. He danced in Disney parades, he headlined a stage production of Grease as Danny Zuko, and he made his feature debut in a film that required no small amount of dancing, albeit of the four-wheeled kind, in a picture that he’d rather everyone forget about.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Unfortunately, history will always remember 1979’s Skatetown, USA as his maiden appearance on the big screen, with director William A Levey capitalising on the roller disco craze to cast Swayze as Ace Johnson in a story about a heated rivalry between two rival skaters who battle for a $1,000 cash prize and a moped, which was apparently the sort of thing that happened at the time.
The production certainly committed to the spectacle. Hollywood’s Palladium was converted into a roller rink for five weeks of shooting, and the filmmakers mounted a camera on a golf cart to follow the skaters around. Whatever Swayze later thought of the result, somebody had put considerable effort into capturing every last wheel-assisted flourish. There’s something rather magnificent about that level of commitment to such a ridiculous premise.
When Entertainment Weekly asked the actor if there were any of his films that should be buried deep underground and never recovered, he didn’t hesitate. “The film that launched me, Skatetown USA,” he replied. “I played the leader of a roller disco gang. I had wild, long hair that people called a mullet.”
If it looks like a mullet and behaves like a mullet, then the chances are high that it’s a mullet. Unless that mullet belongs to Patrick Swayze, apparently, because he was adamant that it was not, in fact, a mullet. “It makes me want to puke,” he declared. “I hate mullets. But I didn’t have a mullet. It was just a mullet in pictures when I combed the top back.”
He may have wanted it buried and deleted from history, but Skatetown USA, and his definitely not a mullet hairdo, haven’t been locked away in the vault as of yet.
