Glenn Close has opened up about how she reacted when told the ending to Fatal Attraction was being changed.
In the past, the eight-time Oscar nominee has been open about the fact that her character in the 1987 thriller was initially supposed to take her own life, only for this to be changed when the movie was screened for test audiences.
Reflecting on making the film during an interview on Drew Barrymore’s US talk show, Glenn explained: “I did a lot of research with psychiatrists for [Fatal Attraction]. And there was an original ending that didn’t end up in the film.”
She continued: “You know that she loved Madame Butterfly – you saw her at the opera, with an empty seat next to her hair, seeing when Madame Butterfly kills herself with a knife. In the original ending, they have that terrible fight, and then she takes that same knife, and as Madame Butterfly is playing, she [kills herself with the knife], and she dies. I have the knife by the way.
“They did shoot that scene. Yes. And when they tested it, the audience hated her so much for coming between that perfect little family – even though he, you know, cheated on his beautiful wife, but whatever – that they felt she needed to be punished even more.”
When Glenn was told the ending had been reworked so that her character would be killed instead, she said that, as the result of her research, she felt that suicide was a more realistic ending, and fought hard for it to stay in the finished movie.
“I said, ‘I won’t do it, that’s not who that woman is’,” she recalled. “It was in a meeting with Adrian [Lyne], the director, a producer and Michael [Douglas], who I love. And I was saying [to Michael], ‘what if it was you, what if it was your character, what would you?!’, so furious.”
“And he said, ‘hey, babe. I’m a whore’,” she added with a laugh. “So I called one of my great friends at the time, and he said, ‘you’ve made your point, now you’ve got to go with the team’. And let go.”
The original ending for Fatal Attraction was included in the film’s initial Japanese release, and was later featured as bonus content when it came out on DVD.
Screenwriter James Dearden said in The Guardian in 2014 that talking Glenn Close into reshooting the new ending is “one of my most shame-inducing recollections”.
When the film was adapted for the screen that same year, the ending was tweaked once again, to make the character of Alex Forrest more of a “tragic, lonely figure, worthy of our sympathy” than the traditional “villain” she can often be perceived as.