Swayze Fought for Whoopi in Ghost

Whoopi Goldberg sat down as the first EGOT winner in 11 years of the show and walked through the backstory of Ghost, including the casting fight that almost kept her out of a role she has now been perfect in for three and a half decades.

The order of the EGOT came up first. Grammy from the Broadway show Whoopi Goldberg came first. Oscar for Ghost next. Tony as producer of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Emmy for Beyond Tara: The Extraordinary Life of Hattie McDaniel, plus a Daytime Emmy for The View. The Oscar itself? Probably on the third floor of her three-story house.

She told the Ghost story cold. A friend came to lunch and mentioned an audition every Black woman in town was fighting for, including, as Whoopi put it, Black women getting up out of the grave to try. She called her agent. His response told her everything. They don't want you. His reasoning, secondhand from the studio, was that she was too big a known commodity and would pull audiences out of the movie.

Her pushback was simple. When Marlon Brando is on screen, nobody spends the movie wondering why Marlon Brando is in it. Didn't matter. They cast someone else.

Then Patrick Swayze stepped in. When the studio told him the cast, he asked a direct question: how come Whoopi Goldberg isn't doing this movie? He told them he wasn't committing until they found out if she would do it, because he wanted to do it with her. He was Jagunda at the time, which gave his ask real weight.

Whoopi was shooting in Alabama. Her agent had to send a runner to find her because cell phones didn't exist yet. The message was, remember that movie they didn't want you for? The actor wants to read with you. Who? Patrick Swayze. Does he know where I am? They're coming to you.

Swayze and a young Mr. Abrams flew to Alabama. They read together. Whoopi called it a match made in heaven and said Swayze was even better than anyone thought.

She didn't know Ghost was special while making it. You shoot scenes thinking you're brilliant, she said, and only later do you see what the editor and director actually shaped. Her favorite scene is Swayze's exit line about love. It gets her every time, partly because it reminds her of her mother and her older brother and the love she hopes she left with them.

The bit audiences quote most is the nun trying to pry the million-dollar check out of her hands. Her defense of the character was clean. She's a fake, but is she? Because suddenly she can do things she didn't know she could do.

The movie stands the test of time. So does the casting story behind it.