Imagine being an actor and meeting a man in the actual role you played on screen. Now imagine that role is President. That’s what happened to Michael Douglas, and he says the sitting president of the United States made it happen in a White House receiving line.
Douglas shared the story with Bill Maher while promoting his new memoir, One Helluva Ride. The moment traces back to The American President, the 1995 romantic comedy in which he played widowed President Andrew Shepherd opposite Annette Bening.
“I did American President and I loved it, and there’s a scene in the movie where we’re having a dinner for… the French prime minister,” Douglas recalled. Not long after the film’s release, life imitated art. “I get an invitation from the White House. President Clinton is inviting me to a dinner at the White House for President Chirac from France. How cool is this?”
The Clintons hosted that state dinner for Jacques Chirac on Feb. 1, 1996. As the guests filed toward the Clintons and the Chiracs, Douglas noticed something unusual. “He looks at me and I see him whispering something to President Chirac,” he said.
When Douglas reached the front of the line, Clinton had a plan. “He goes, ‘Michael, come here. You stand here. You stand here where I am,’” Douglas said. Clinton then took a spot in the line himself and greeted his guest. “He says, ‘Hello, Mr. President.’”
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Douglas still has the photos. “I have this series of pictures and it’s just… it’s like if they could see me now,” he said. “It’s one of those moments.”
Clinton has told his own version of the friendship. At a London charity gala in 2006, he joked that during his presidency he had tried to talk Douglas into taking his place for an hour so he could have a break, and that the actor had no trouble turning him down.
The film’s influence reached well beyond that night. Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, and Douglas said director Rob Reiner told him the first draft ran long. “First draft of American President, Rob tells me, was 375 pages long,” Douglas said. Much of the material that was cut found a second life. Sorkin’s series The West Wing, Douglas said, “was predominantly based on a lot of the pages that were cut out of the American President movie.” Other accounts put Sorkin’s first draft at about 385 pages, and note that one unused storyline became the basis for the 1999 pilot.
For Douglas, the blend of politics and celebrity seems to run in the family. During the 1960s, his father, Kirk Douglas, made goodwill tours abroad for the U.S. Information Agency, presenting films such as Spartacus to audiences overseas. “They took movie stars like my father and they sent them on tours,” Douglas told Maher.
Three decades after he played a president on screen, Douglas still keeps the photos from the night he got to stand in for a real one.
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