Gene Wilder’s Comic Rapport With Richard Pryor Was Like ‘Sexual Chemistry’
Conan O’Brien was blown away by Gene Wilder's chemistry with Richard Pryor in movie comedies like Silver Streak and Stir Crazy. Did Wilder feel it too? Boy, did he. “I don’t want to be shocking,” Wilder told Conan in 2005, “but it’s a little bit like a sexual chemistry.”
“Look, it’s true,” Wilder argued after the audience’s amused reaction. “You see someone and you say, ‘I really am attracted to that woman, right?’ And someone says, ‘But why her? That girl is much prettier. She’s taller, she’s shorter, she’s fatter, she’s slimmer. Why that one?’ I don’t know.”
Pryor, in other words, was the right one for Wilder. “When Richard and I did our first scene, some magic happened. What they call chemistry,” Wilder explained. “He improvised. I used to improvise in class but not in front of the movie camera. And I would answer him back and forth, back and forth, and we were on such a similar wavelength.”
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In another interview in 2007, Wilder talked about their improvisational chemistry in greater detail. “We did this scene at a train station. He said his first line, I said my first line, and then this other line comes out of him. I had no idea where it came from, but I didn’t question it. I just responded naturally.”
And that, Wilder said, was the key to the comedy. “I didn’t try and think of a clever line, which is the great death trap for actors if you’re improvising. If you say, ‘I’ll think of (a line) that’s even funnier than that or more clever than that’ — no. I just said what came naturally in the situation. Everything we did together was like that.”
Wilder told O’Brien about another scene from Stir Crazy when both he and Pryor started to hum a melody from an old Laurel and Hardy short at the same time. “When Sidney Poitier said cut, I said, ‘Did you know you were going to do that?’ And he said, ‘No, did you know?’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ But we both did it, on beat, at the same time.”
Unfortunately, for Wilder, that chemistry didn’t extend into their personal relationship. While he would have liked to extend their on-screen romance into an off-camera friendship, the chemistry “didn't translate,” he said. The biography Becoming Richard Pryor backs up that account: “Although some imagined that, given his on-screen chemistry with Wilder, the two had to be friends off-screen, in fact they never met outside the context of their working relationship.”
Pryor “had his own world, his friends and everything” — and no matter their cinematic chemistry, Wilder wasn’t part of that world.
