Alan Hale Jr. Went To Extreme Lengths To Land His Gilligan’s Island Role

When Alan Hale Jr. made his “Gilligan’s Island” debut as the Skipper, it wasn’t the first time he’d gotten stranded somewhere. According to MeTV (which references a 1988 interview featuring the actor), Hale actually hitchhiked out of the Pine Valley Mountains in order to make it back to Hollywood for his casting meeting.

“I was in St. George, Utah, doing a picture with Audie Murphy and I get this call to come down,” Hale, who died in 1990, explained. “Well, we had a small budget picture and there was kind of a difficulty as to how I was going to get there.” The film in question was “Bullet for a Badman,” a 1964 Western directed by R.G. Springsteen. It follows two brothers, both ex-Texas Rangers, who come into conflict when one marries the other’s ex-wife while he’s away in jail. Hale had a fairly small role in the film, playing a character named Leach. “Bullet For a Badman” doesn’t seem to have made a strong impression in the Western genre, and given the comparatively massive pop cultural legacy of “Gilligan’s Island,” it’s no wonder Hale hightailed it out of town to nab a starring role on TV.

Hale had a problem, though. “There were no planes out of there, there were no rental cars,” he explained in the interview shared by MeTV. “So I went out on the highway with my thumb.” Utah is one of the few states today that has some legislature prohibiting hitchhiking entirely, but back in 1964, hitching a ride with a stranger was an extremely common — if not always safe — way to get around. Hale didn’t share any details about his unexpected carpool, so we can assume it was a pretty uneventful ride, but he ended up traveling about 120 miles with the driver or drivers who offered him a ride. “I hitchhiked out of St. George, got down to Las Vegas, and flew from Las Vegas into CBS,” Hale recalled.

Luckily, the risky travel plans paid off: Hale didn’t actually end up needing to formally audition for his part in the show, and his part was pretty much a done deal by the time he arrived in Los Angeles. “If you’d like to be The Skipper, you are,” series creator Sherwood Schwartz reportedly told Hale upon his arrival. In his own book “Inside Gilligan’s Island,” Schwartz says that CBS had a rule that every actor hired needed a current screen test with Bob Denver on the books, in case their appearance had changed since they last did one. Schwartz wanted Hale for the role (his first impression of the actor was that of a “big, blonde, huggable teddy bear”), but the screen test turnaround time was tight, and Hale’s movie was apparently shooting six days a week “down in a gorge” with equipment carried in by pack mules.

According to Schwartz, the pilot of “Gilligan’s Island” was set to film in three weeks by this point, and Hale had two more weeks of filming on his Western. Schwartz tried to secure transportation for Hale, but it was a no-go, and the actor had to make his own way to the studio. “Alan read the script and loved it,” Schwartz wrote. “He knew the only way he could get the part was to get to Hollywood on Sunday, and he took direct action.” Apparently the actors on “Bullet For a Badman” had gotten to the production location on horseback, so Hale and co-star Skip Homeier rode up from the gorge together and Homeier stayed with Hale’s horse until he got back from Hollywood. Not only did Hale hitch a ride to Vegas, but Schwartz says he also hitched one back to where his horse was waiting for him in Utah once the role had been very quickly secured. It’s a wild story worthy of a “Gilligan’s Island” episode, and we wouldn’t have the Skipper without it.