Credit: Far Out / Warner Bros.
Fri 31 July 2026 21:15, UK
Nobody usually raised an eyebrow whenever John Wayne felt the need to tear a co-star a new one, and he did it more than a few times during his career, but doing it to a literal child seems a wee bit harsh.
Not that ‘The Duke’ gave a shit, clearly, after developing the habit of repeatedly losing his cool with a nine-year-old in front of the cast and crew. Weirdly, the little fella was a veteran himself, so maybe you can understand why Wayne got so short-tempered with his performance, but only if you hate kids.
Otherwise, there’s no need for a grown man to be yelling at a little boy, especially one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. The face of the ‘Golden Age’ western was known for being a perfectionist, though, and whenever things weren’t going to his liking, he was known to tell anyone within earshot that they were doing it wrong, and the best way to do it was, of course, John Wayne’s way.
In general, he wasn’t having a very good time of it. 1953’s Hondo was your standard ‘Duke’ vehicle in almost every way, shape, and form, but partnering him up with a method actor in their feature-length debut led to some tension behind the scenes, mostly because the leading man couldn’t understand what Geraldine Page was trying to accomplish.
Wayne was never the biggest fan of acting’s more immersive offshoot, but Page got the last laugh when her nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, her first of seven Oscar nods in total, was the only awards season recognition the movie received, not that he could wrap his head around how she’d pulled it off.
Meanwhile, young Lee Aaker had been cast as Johnny Lowe, the son of Page’s Angie, whom Wayne’s title character protects throughout the film. He’d already been in more than a dozen pictures, despite only making the first of them two years previously, so as far as child actors go, he was hardly a novice.
Unfortunately for him, a combination of the star’s distaste for Page and his complete disinterest in whatever director John Farrow was supposed to be doing, with ‘The Duke’ subsequently saying the filmmaker “didn’t really have a great deal to do with the film” and he’d basically ghost-directed it himself, led to him carting around a shorter fuse than usual.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“Every morning, when he would be hungover, he would have a screaming fit,” Page recalled. “He’d yell at somebody until he got hoarse.” One morning, the subject of his ire turned out to be the unwitting Aaker, who wasn’t performing a scene the way that Wayne had repeatedly instructed him to do it.
“Wayne got tired of it,” Hondo’s leading lady added. “He kept trying to bully the child into doing what he wanted, and the boy wouldn’t do it.” Nothing says ‘consummate professional’ like bullying a nine-year-old into trying to perform their lines to your satisfaction, and he’d have been as glad to see the back of Aaker as he was to see the back of Page.
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