The Directors of ‘Airplane!’ Had to Lie to an Actor in Order to Get Him to Say the Movie’s Filthiest Joke

Even 44 years after its release, Airplane! is still considered one of the funniest movies ever made, having entertained generations of fans, and forever ruined any earnest use of the word “surely” in a sentence.

A big reason why Airplane! works so well is its casting. While Paramount wanted to cast the biggest comedy stars of the day, floating names like Chevy Chase and Bill Murray, directors Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker instead opted to hire more dramatic actors in the lead roles, such as Lloyd Bridges and Leslie Nielsen. Keep in mind, this was back when Leslie Nielsen was still considered a dramatic actor.

Enlisting serious actors to play every single absurd scene completely straight is what made the movie hilarious. But casting non-comedians in a comedy did present certain challenges. For example, in order to get the right performance out of Robert Stack, of TV’s The Untouchables fame, the filmmakers had to show the actor a clip of comedian John Byner doing an impression of Stack, hoping to get “Robert Stack doing John Byner doing Robert Stack.”

“I get it – we’re the joke!” Stack reportedly mused.

Peter Graves, who played Jim Phelps in the original Mission: Impossible series, was cast as pilot Captain Clarence Oveur, and tasked with the most ridiculously, conspicuously offensive dialogue in the entire film. When a small boy named Joey is given a tour of the cockpit, Captain Oveur famously asks him, “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” The shockingly inappropriate line of questioning then continued with queries about gladiator movies and Turkish prisons.

Understandably, the “devout Christian” Graves was a hard sell, telling ZAZ that the script was “the most disgusting piece of trash I have ever read in my life.” Their response? “Thank you.” David Zucker later admitted that he understood where Graves was coming from: “Can you blame him? He’s playing a pedophile, and every line he has is horrifying.”

Graves eventually came aboard, but only after his wife and daughter convinced him to. “Peter Graves was the sweetest guy on the set and would do what we asked, but I don’t think he really got what he was doing,” David Zucker told The Telegraph in 2020.

For the scene in which Graves had to deadpan a bunch of pedophile jokes, the filmmakers straight up lied to him about how it would be portrayed. “There was a moment when he said, ‘Why am I telling this child about a Turkish prison?’ and we told him, ‘It’s fine. That bit will be explained later in a part that you aren’t in,’” Zucker recalled.

Of course, there was no contextual explainer scene, Graves’ lines were just creepy non-sequiturs that likely came from ZAZ riffing on a near-identical scene in Airplane!’s 1950s predecessor Zero Hour.

Perhaps the missing context will be revealed when Paramount+ eventually greenlights the prestige TV prequel Captain Oveur: Origins.

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