Eddie Van Halen intended to be in the 2020 film Bill & Ted Face the Music, according to the film’s co-star Alex Winter.
Here is what Winter (aka Bill S. Preston, Esq.) had to say during a recent appearance on The Paltrocast with host Darren Paltrowitz.
We asked Eddie to be in every single movie and every single movie he said ‘no.’ So when we got to Bill & Ted 3 — and this is a somewhat bittersweet anecdote — we had a whole sequence which ended up being the Dave Grohl sequence. That’s supposed to be [at Eddie] Van Halen’s house.
We went to Eddie, and we were like, ‘Would you please, please be in the third movie?’… He’s like, ‘You know what you guys, this one I would have done,’ but he was dying at that point. He was already quite sick. He didn’t tell us that he was literally gonna pass, but he was like, ‘I’m not well and I can’t do it. But I really appreciate these films. We all love them. And if I wasn’t sick, I would absolutely come down to New Orleans and shoot this with you.'”
So it had kind of a bittersweet end. It was a running joke in Bill & Ted amongst the little family of ours that every single movie we would be like knocking on Eddie’s door, and he’d be like ‘no’ and slamming it, so it was not for lack of trying.
Watch Eddie Van Halen’s Appearance At The Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey Premiere (1991)
Watch “Van Halen Reference on Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989)
Darren Paltrowitz can be heard on the David Lee Roth podcast The DLR Cast with co-host Steve Roth. You can also catch his interviews with various celebrities on his podcast The Paltrocast. His complete interview with Alex Winter can be viewed HERE.