No one knows how Back to the Future might have turned out had Eric Stoltz not been replaced by Michael J Fox five weeks into shooting, though the odd snatch of video has emerged in recent years and there are rumours that Fox’s predecessor can still be spotted in some scenes from the final movie. That’s more than can be said for Stuart Townsend’s canned take on Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but at least we can now get a tiny glimpse into how Chris Farley’s Shrek might have turned out had the actor not died as a result of a drug overdose, aged 33, in late 1997.
A Shrek storyboard video has emerged with a soundtrack from the original recording of dialogue between Farley and Eddie Murphy for the 2001 film, which was eventually recast with Farley’s Saturday Night Live co-star Mike Myers as the lime-green ogre. Farley’s brother Kevin has described the earlier version as “a little bit more like Chris, like a humble, bumbling innocent guy”, and it’s clear from the recording that Shrek’s curmudgeonly personality – and even the irritating enthusiasm of Eddie Murphy’s Donkey – were later additions.
Kevin Farley told Yahoo! recently he was unsure why his brother’s work – which apparently comprised 80-90% of his character’s lines – was scrapped but imagined studio Sony “probably wanted to make Shrek 1, 2, 3, 4, 5”, adding: “The studio needed to do what they needed to do. It was a bad time, bad timing … a tragedy. Mike did a great job with Shrek. He knocked it out of the park.”
We can guess how the shift from nice-guy ogre to grumpy green giant altered the film’s storyline: Farley’s Shrek says he has been offered his own swamp by villain Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) if he will go on a quest to retrieve a princess from a terrifying dragon. In the final version, Myers’ Shrek has his own swamp, but agrees to do Farquaad’s bidding after the vertically challenged autocrat promises to remove the gaggles of fairytale creatures who have gathered there to escape persecution.
Farley’s Shrek is a likable creation, but without an angry curmudgeon to play off, Murphy’s blabbermouthed, asinine brio seems diminished. Still, this stands as another fascinating curio of what might have been: the Shrek films have taken more than $3.5bn at the global box office, and would surely have made Farley an even bigger star had he lived.
