John Belushi had a reputation for being hard to work with at times. Perhaps nobody knew this better than John Landis, who directed Belushi in 1978’s Animal House and 1980’s The Blues Brothers. Landis’s issue was that Belushi had gotten himself addicted to cocaine by the time production began on The Blues Brothers in 1979. According to the director, it was that addiction that almost killed him before they finished the movie.
As Landis tells it, it was challenging to keep drugs away from Belushi because strangers were constantly offering them to him. In a 2020 retrospective with The Guardian, Belushi’s Blues Brothers co-star Dan Aykroyd said, “Cocaine was a currency. For some of the crew working nights, it was like coffee.” Landis was a teetotaler, and their behavior drove him crazy. He could never be sure who would show up after the late-night parties they would have.
Belushi’s cocaine use in particular would cause production to stall from time to time, but he insisted it was what fueled his performance. Aykroyd told Vanity Fair in 2012 that the movie even had a cocaine budget for night shoots. “Everyone did it, including me. Never to excess, and not ever to where I wanted to buy it or have it,” he explained. Belushi, however, “loved what it did,” Aykroyd said. “It sort of brought him alive at night—that superpower feeling where you start to talk and converse and figure you can solve all the world’s problems.”
Eventually, a doctor came in to examine Belushi and warned the film’s producer to get him off whatever drugs he was taking. “If you don’t,” he insisted, “get as many movies out of him as possible, because he has only two to three years to live.” Landis told anyone who saw Belushi doing drugs to stop him, but it fell on deaf ears.
Landis later found Belushi slumped over behind a huge pile of cocaine; he described the scene as looking like something out of Scarface. Having had enough at that point, Landis flushed all the coke down the toilet. Belushi got up and shoved him in a rage. Then Landis punched Belushi in the face. They scuffled for about 15 seconds before Belushi started crying and apologized.
But somehow, despite all those difficulties, the movie was completed and went on to be a major success. Sadly, though, the doctor’s prediction about Belushi turned out to be accurate, and the comedian died from an overdose of cocaine and heroin a few years later at the age of 33.
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