A Legendary Comedian Wanted an Insane Amount of Money to Play a Murderer on ‘Columbo’
A trailer dropped for the second season of Poker Face, the Natasha Lyonne-starring mystery series about an amateur detective who somehow isn’t named “Columbo.” As the new promo illustrates, the next season is chock-full of celebrity guests, specifically, a number of comedy stars, including John Mulaney, Kumail Nanjiani, Patti Harrison, Awkwafina and David Alan Grier.
Clearly Columbo was a major influence on Poker Face, especially since Lyonne lobbied to play the role made famous by Peter Falk for years prior to landing her own murder-heavy show. But while Poker Face is happy to cast comics, Columbo rarely featured comedians in guest parts. Although Lt. Columbo did face off against a killer played by Billy Connolly in a 2001 TV movie.
But it turns out that one classic Columbo episode came very close to featuring a comedy legend, until the matter of his paycheck came up.
1974’s “Negative Reaction” guest-starred a bearded Dick Van Dyke as a photographer who murders his wife and attempts to blame it on a phony kidnapping scheme. Columbo eventually figures out a way to take him down that doesn’t involve luring him past a stray ottoman.
Per The Columbophile, the book Shooting Columbo by David Koening revealed that a number of actors were considered for the Van Dyke part, including Orson Welles, Alec Guinness, William Shatner and Jerry Lewis. One name that interested Falk was Peter Sellers, who, come to think of it, was also famous for playing a trenchcoat-wearing detective.
The notoriously-difficult Sellers was open to the idea of guest-starring in Columbo, but he asked for a massive sum of money: $360,000 which was “18 times the most the show had ever paid for a guest star.”
It wasn’t unusual for Sellers to charge a high fee for his services. While making Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, he was reportedly paid $1 million for playing three characters, which amounted to more than half of the movie’s entire budget. “I got three for the price of six,” Kubrick joked.
And although Sellers died before he got to make a sixth Pink Panther movie, he was set to make $3 million for the planned sequel The Romance of the Pink Panther, plus “10 percent of the gross.” Instead, director Blake Edwards turned the project into a legally and ethically-questionable clip show.
Sellers’ high price tag precluded him from appearing in Columbo, but Falk did get a chance to work with the former Goon Show star just a few years later, in the Neil Simon-penned mystery parody Murder by Death. Falk played the Sam Spade knock-off Sam Diamond, while Sellers played a wildly racist caricature named Inspector Sidney Wang.
In retrospect, he probably should have just done Columbo instead.
