Dabney Coleman, Terrence Winter, and the great cancer brouhaha

In late 2012, I interviewed Dabney Coleman for Random Roles, and lemme tell ya something: if you haven’t read it yet, well, God almighty, you’re missing something. It was a bucket list interview for me, one that I went after personally rather than anyone offering it to me, and it was everything I could’ve hoped for…except for the bit where I sent Dabney’s team into a tailspin when I unwittingly helped tell the world at large that he’d had cancer, not realizing that cancer can still be a really big deal in terms of actors getting insurance even after it’s gone into remission.

But I’ll get to that…or maybe I won’t. In the meantime, though, here’s the relevant portion of the conversation between myself and Dabney…

How much advance knowledge did you have of the Commodore’s condition, as far as the fact that he was being poisoned?

Dabney Coleman: None, I believe. [Hesitates.] Are you talking about the symptoms?

What I mean is, did they tell you right off the bat that he was being poisoned, or did they just tell you that he was sickly?

Well, originally I was supposed to be dead after six episodes. [Laughs.] And then I called them—because they didn’t send us full scripts, they just sent us our scenes, so I had to fly back every two weeks or so, not really knowing fully what was going on. Maybe who I’m talking to and what my relationship was with the person and what had gone on in our past, but I had to call the writer or Terry every time before I shot and ask, “What’s going on?” And I had heard that I was going to be dead after six shows, and I called him before I shot the sixth and said, “What’s going on?” He said, “Well, we’ve decided to build your part up. We’re not going to kill you off. In fact, we’re going to have you try to take over the whole thing next season. You’re going to battle Nucky Thompson,” Buscemi’s character. And I said, “Well, that’s fine by me!” [Laughs.]

So I shot two more shows… and then that December I got cancer. So I called them and told them, I said, “I’ve got cancer,” and they said, “Are you able to continue doing it? And would you like to?” And I said, “Hell, yes!” So I flew back in February, and they weren’t supposed to shoot ’til July, but I went back in February and had… Let’s see, now how did we do that? We had minimal cast. In fact, sometimes I was talking to an actress who wasn’t there. Like, for Gretchen Mol, I was talking to a stunt double. In that scene where she was dancing for me? My half of that scene was shot about four months before Gretchen shot her half. So I was talking to a double for the dancer, and Gretchen was there, actually, but she was eight months pregnant! [Laughs.] She was sitting in a chair, eight months pregnant, reading me the lines. So that’s the way we did that. I had to shoot my stuff before I lost too much weight and before I lost my voice. It came back, but not normal. So they certainly didn’t write me up; they wrote me out. After about six or seven shows, something like that. And I didn’t have much to do after the first couple of shows. I was mute because of the stroke that I had. In the show, that is. Not in reality. [Hesitates.] Are you following me?

Yep.

Okay, good! [Laughs.] So, anyway, that’s what happened. The last four or five shows, I barely said a word. Either not much or not at all. I think they were afraid they couldn’t trust my voice, which did kick out one time so I could barely speak. After that, it came back enough so that you could at least understand me, but I think they just didn’t know, so they said, “Well, we just can’t take a chance here.” That’s just speculation on my part, though. No one’s ever told me this. I’m just speculating based on what they told me before the cancer and what happened after. So that’s what I think happened there. They said, “We can’t risk this. We’ve gotta get rid of him. We don’t know what’s gonna happen with this guy. He could drop dead in reality! And then where are we? We can’t base a lot of the show on him.” So that’s just my educated guess on what happened. But by the way, I don’t have cancer anymore. Thanks for asking. [Laughs.]

Well, I was going to ask, then I was like, “Well, what if it’s come back? I don’t want to hear him say that.” So I decided I wouldn’t ask after all.

I don’t believe you. [Laughs.] But we can hash that out later. Either way, there’s your answer!

After Coleman told me that story, my first thought was, “Did I miss the news story about Dabney getting cancer?” As it turned out, I did not. It wasn’t widely known information. Still, based on what I’d just heard, there was clearly at least one person who knew, and it was the same person who could answer the question, “Is Dabney’s ‘educated guess’ about the way things shook out on Boardwalk Empire actually correct?”

So I reached out to Terence Winter.

Truth be told, I didn’t anticipate getting anything other than an email at best, but after I sent along Coleman’s quotes, I actually got a call from Winter in return.

Why?

“We’re finally wrapped for the third season,” he explained. “So I’m going to try and rest my one typing finger for as long as I can.”

I rediscovered the full transcript of that phone conversation this evening, so I thought I’d share it with you, but fair warning: if there was any sort of back-and-forth between us, I didn't capture it in this word doc, which is simply him telling the story of what went down with the Commodore.

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“It’s interesting to read it from Dabney’s perspective. For the most part, it’s all accurate, except maybe for the timeline being a little off. Originally, going into Season 2, because of the way we ended in Season 1, the people closest to Nucky were going to conspire against him, and this was all going to be led by the Commodore. It was really in the early part of plotting out how that would all work in Season 2 that I got a call. I think it was in January, the weekend of the AFI Awards for Season 1, so, y’know, it was a perfect day, a great week, we’d just had the AFI luncheon and I was driving home when I got a call from Dabney’s manager that he was just diagnosed with throat cancer. Obviously, that threw a huge monkey wrench into everything.

First and foremost, there was concern for Dabney, but secondly it was, ‘Okay, how do we work with this on the show, and what is he willing and able to do?’ So we spoke to him, and he told me what his course of treatment was going to be, so we got together with HBO and I said, ‘Look, this really derails our plans for the season in a big way, so we really have to rethink this.’ We still wanted to keep the original story, where everybody conspires against Nucky and the Commodore leads the charge, but we thought that if there’s a way to have the Commodore set up the conspiracy, set up Nucky’s arrest, Eli’s on board, Jimmy’s on board, everybody’s behind them, and then early on the guy who’s leading this charge is now incapacitated…from a story perspective, it actually amps things up in a really great way. Suddenly the general is out of commission, and these guys start turning on each other. So the challenge was to rewrite the arc of the season to that way, and also to shoot Dabney’s scenes out over the next few weeks, because he was going to be entering treatment immediately, and he didn’t know what effect it would have on his voice or his general ability to work or how tired it was going to be.

So we had to very quickly write all the scenes involving the Commodore for the first four episodes without having the episodes written. We really were sort of flying blind, so we just wrote, y’know, the early scenes with the Commodore lifting the tusk over his head, meeting with Jimmy and Jimmy’s reluctance, and, of course, where he had the stroke, which he talked about. That was a complete clusterfuck. [Laughs.] Because Gretchen Mol was eight months pregnant. That thing was shot in pieces, and, I mean, it’s remarkable how seamless it looks when you see it on TV. You can’t believe the two of them were never in the same…well, they were in the same room, but they were never in the same shot together. So, anyway, we just really wrote quickly, Dabney came in, I think he worked, like, six days straight. It was all Dabney, all the time. We shot all those scenes and then inserted them in later. And then we knew we’d take him out of the middle of the season because he’d be getting treatment, and then, of course, work him back into the show when he was able to work again. But we kept in constant touch with him all through the year.

By the way, talking about his perspective, he said the plan was to kill him off early in the first season. That was never my plan. I don’t know where he got that from, if he talked to a crew person or somebody. You know, there’s all kinds of rumors that fly around on set. I don’t know where people pick things up. But that was never the case. It was always going to be the case that he’d recover from the poisoning and continue on. It was also always the case that he would get killed by Jimmy at the end of Season 2, so…I don’t know if he sort of inferred that we killed him off because he got sick, but that was never the case. And I think he might’ve realized that when we killed Jimmy off a week later. [Laughs.] I think he realized that it wasn’t about him and his illness, that the plan for him to be killed was sort of in place already.

So, anyway, that’s the story. Dabney was just a joy to work with, an absolutely lovely guy and really funny, and just a joy to have around. We all miss working with him.

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After I’d transcribed this call and sent it along to the A.V. Club, I contacted Coleman’s team, and that’s when I found out that, despite the fact that it happily ended in remission, they were positively horrified about Dabney’s cancer story being front and center.

Indeed, they asked if there was any way I could pull that bit altogether, fearing that it would have a negative impact on his ability to work in the future. Being the nice guy that I am, I suddenly felt nauseous, because I knew there was nothing that could be done about it at this stage of the game: the A.V. Club was clearly going to run the piece, because they’d decided to do a Newswire story about the cancer and Winter’s comments before the Random Roles itself had even run!

Thankfully, his team seemed at least semi-understanding, and they definitely seemed to believe that I legitimately had no idea what sort of impact the story was going to have, which is good, because I’m not kidding: I thought I was going to throw up.

One thing I know for sure, though, is that I was pretty fucking thrilled when I started seeing Coleman start working again a few years ago, popping up in Warren Beatty’s Rules Don’t Apply as well as in TV guest spots on Ray Donovan, NCIS, and Yellowstone.

But there’s one question still remains: was I the reason we didn’t see him in anything between 2012 and 2016?

If so, I’m really, really, really sorry.