While attending the 2024 Sundance Film Festival to promote Chris Smith’s new documentary “Devo,” Mothersbaugh revealed to The Wrap that Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, while in pre-production on “Back to the Future,” went to a Devo show and approached him after the concert about playing the shock-white-haired mad (but lovable) scientist.
According to Mothersbaugh, “I went into this meeting and they said, ‘Well, we love what you do on stage. We love the way your band looks. We want you to be sort of a crazy mad scientist in this film we’re doing.” When Mothersbaugh pressed them for details, they replied, “There’s a part in the film of a guy who runs around in a lab coat and he has a car that goes through time. We want you to play that part.”
This was probably 1984, so consider the magnitude of this offer. Spielberg had established himself as Hollywood’s preeminent dream weaver via “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” and the first two Indiana Jones films, while Zemeckis was a rising star on the strength of “Romancing the Stone.” If Mothersbaugh wanted to be a movie star, this was a first-class ticket to the big time.
But the Devo frontman, who wasn’t above playing the Hollywood game (Devo had written two songs for Dan Aykroyd’s 1983 non-triumph “Doctor Detroit”), shut the duo down, telling them he had no interest in an acting career. When they countered that he was basically acting on stage and in the band’s music videos (most famously “Whip It”), he countered, “Well, we make that stuff up ourselves.”
Fair enough. But let’s say Mothersbaugh was open to an acting career. How would that have altered the entertainment landscape as we know it today?
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