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Close can talk sanguinely about it now, but when she was first called upon to reshoot the ending of Fatal Attraction, six months after they wrapped, she refused.
"I fought it for two weeks," she told the NY Times. "It was going to make a character I loved into a murdering psychopath. I was in a meeting with Michael, Stanley and Adrian. I was furious! I said to Michael, 'How would you feel if it were your character?' He said, 'Babe, I'm a whore.'"
As in, he did what the people paying him told him to do. "Yes, I said something to that effect," Douglas agreed.
But though Close held out the longest, she wasn't the only one who resisted—Lyne didn't want to do it either, saying that was giving in to the "lowest common denominator," Lansing (who agreed with the director) said. The filmmakers were ultimately offered $1.5 million for a reshoot and a promise that, if they didn't like what came out of it, they didn't have to use it.
Archer, for her part, liked the original ending and the performance she'd given in it. "I burst into tears," she told Galloway. "My whole life and career and heart were on my sleeve."