20 facts you might not know about 'Walk Hard'

Jake Kasdan may be the son of legendary screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan (the dude had credit on The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark in back-to-back years), but he’s no slouch as a writer and director. He had already written and directed a couple of smaller films and had the idea to do a fake music biopic as a parody of self-serious films of this nature.

Zero Effect is a really good film (see it if you haven’t), but it doesn’t necessarily get a studio to give you the budget to make a fake music biopic. However, Kasdan brought his idea to his friend Judd Apatow, a bigwig in Hollywood by this time. The two wrote the film together and shared screenwriting credit.

Plenty of music biopics have been made, and Kasdan and Apatow watched many of them. They watched biopics of all sorts for inspiration, including the fairly recent Marilyn Monroe biopic that had come out.

Part of what makes Walk Hard work so well is that it’s, you know, incredibly funny. What also makes it work is that it is dedicated to parodying Oscar-bait music biopics. They shot and composed the film and gave it a serious tone to play up the humor. Much like Airplane!, they played it straight to nail the parody.

Thanks to Adam McKay, Reilly is known for his comedy chops, but he had other skills. If you’ve seen Chicago, you know he can sing. Additionally, Reilly could play guitar. That made him a fine choice to play Dewey.

Fischer is in the ersatz June Carter Cash role, but unlike Reilly, the erstwhile Pam Beesly star did not provide Darlene’s singing voice. Musician Angela Correa did the singing.

Reilly mentioned the idea to Fischer of her auditioning to play Darlene. Fischer was interested, but when she got the script, she assumed there had been a mistake. The actress figured that Reilly had meant that he wanted Fischer to play Dewey’s first wife, played by Kristen Wiig. When informed that no mistake was made, Fischer thought, “Darlene like his sexy wife lady? No one ever wants me for that role. I’m like, ‘Check again.’”

Jenna Fischer, Craig Robinson, and Ed Helms are all in Walk Hard. They also all starred in The Office. Dewey’s parents Raymond Barry and Margo Martindale were both on Justified. Most notably, David Krumholtz, Martin Starr, Jason Schwartzman, and Steve Bannos, had all appeared on Freaks and Geeks, a show produced by Apatow.

Like many biopics, Walk Hard is filled with characters who are famous people. They are also played by famous people in Walk Hard. The impressions are broad, be it the guys playing the Beatles or Jack White as Elvis. This was the point, though. The “deliberate miscasting” was another riff on music biopics.

The poster for Walk Hard (which also happened to be headlined as “From the guy who brought you Knocked Up and Superbad") may look familiar. It features Reilly as Dewey in a pose made famous by Jim Morrison in an iconic photo of the Doors frontman.

Dan Bern and Mike Viola handled much of the original music in Walk Hard, but they weren’t the only ones. The song “Black Sheep,” a parody of Brian Wilson’s drug-induced “Smile” days, was written by Van Dyke Parks. Parks was Wilson’s writing partner back in the day.

In one scene, Dewey and L’Chaim, Harold Ramis’ character, speak in Hebrew for privacy. According to Apatow, in every take, Reilly could cry on cue at the same time in the scene. That’s impressive, but what’s even more impressive? Reilly was reading his lines phonetically off cue cards. He had no idea what he was saying but managed to cry anyway.

Dewey’s brother dies as a kid, but eventually, his brother’s spirit visits him as an adult ghost played by Jonah Hill. Apparently, there is, in a way, some basis for this in real life. In his autobiography, Johnny Cash said that he spoke to the spirit of his dead brother Jack throughout his life and that Jack’s ghost aged along with him.

Craig Robinson’s singer is named Bobby Shad. This also happens to be the name of Apatow’s grandfather. However, this was an apt bit of familial recognition in some ways. The real Shad was a record producer and produced the first record by Janis Joplin’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company.

In the lead-up to Walk Hard, Reilly went on tour as Dewey Cox with a backing band called the Hardwalkers. They performed songs along the way, starting with a show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and ending with a performance on Good Morning America.

Reilly’s touring bore no fruit. Walk Hard was made for $35 million. Unfortunately for Kasdan and Co., it earned $20.6 million…worldwide. Yes, this is the rare studio film release that did not make back its budget.

How were movies promoted in 2007? This was before social media became super prominent. You would go on talk shows, right? Hey, that still happens today. Walk Hard came out during the WGA strike, and talk shows weren’t on air. As Reilly explained for The Ringer's oral history, “This movie really needed to be explained to people that ‘It’s not a real person. It’s a satire.’ And that’s what you are able to do on a talk show. You could do it to a wide audience on a talk show.” Alas, no talk show appearances were there to be had, and maybe that did play a role in the movie flopping.

Directing a flop can set your career back, and it would be four years until Kasdan’s next film, Bad Teacher. Ultimately, the director saw his career explode a decade later. Kasdan was tapped to direct Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the 2017 film that served as a delayed sequel to 1995’s Jumanji. Welcome to the Jungle proceeded to make nearly a billion dollars and become the highest-grossing Sony film ever in the domestic market until Spider-Man: No Way Home surpassed it in 2021. Kasdan also directed that movie’s follow-up, The Next Level.

John C. Reilly was nominated for a Golden Globe, and the title song was nominated as well (which was also a nomination for Reilly since he sang it). The soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy. The movie didn’t win any of these awards, though.

Time has been kind to Walk Hard. While a flop, it has now been solidified as a cult classic. Rolling Stone featured an article about how it almost killed the music biopic. The Ringer did a massive oral history of the film. Walk Hard has been revisited many times over now, and its cult will likely only continue to grow.