The American science fiction comedy Bill & Ted, starring Alex Winter and Keannu Reeves hit the theathers back in 1989 and two years later had a sequence that helped the movies to gain a huge cult-following audience over the decades. Both characters from the film loved Rock and Roll music, what made the music be something very important in the scripts.
In 2020, the third movie from the franchise was released and it had a lot of famous artists appearing quickly in some scenes. One of them is the Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl, but as Alex Winter revealed in an interview with Paltrocast (Transcribed by Blabbermouth), it should have been Eddie Van Halen.
Eddie Van Halen was almost part of the third Bill & Ted movie
“We asked Eddie to be in every single movie and every single movie he said ‘no,'” Winter said. “So when we got to ‘Bill & Ted 3’ — and this is a somewhat bittersweet anecdote — we had a whole sequence which ended up being the Dave Grohl sequence. That’s supposed to be (at Eddie) Van Halen‘s house.”
“We went to Eddie, and we were like, ‘Would you please, please be in the third movie?’ He’s, like, ‘You know what, you guys. This one I would have done.’ But he was dying at that point. He was already quite sick.”
Winter continued:
“He didn’t tell us that he was literally gonna pass, but he was, like, ‘I’m not well and I can’t do it. But I really appreciate these films. We all love them. And if I wasn’t sick, I would absolutely come down to New Orleans and shoot this with you.'”
“So it had kind of a bittersweet end,” Winter added. “It was a running joke in ‘Bill & Ted’ amongst the little family of ours that every single movie we would be like knocking on Eddie’s door, and he’d be, like, ‘no’ and slamming it, so it was not for lack of trying,” Alex Winter said.
Besides being an actor, Alex Winter also became a director over the years. He made documentaries about the Deep Web, Panama Papers and more recently of Frank Zappa.