Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey took a unique turn for a broad comedy when it was released in 1991. One of the funniest jokes was a spoof of a classic Ingmar Bergman historical fantasy film called The Seventh Seal. That film is a 1957 Swedish movie where Max von Sydow plays Antonius Block, a disillusioned knight who returns home from the Crusades only to find medieval Sweden ravaged by the plague. When Block learns he is dying, he makes a deal with the personification of Death (Bengt Ekerot). They will play a game of chess, and if Block wins, he is allowed to live. The real reason for Block’s challenge was to delay Death long enough to get home to see his wife one last time.
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Spoofing a Swedish masterpiece was an interesting choice, and it allowed William Sadler to play Death when Bill and Ted died in the movie. However, instead of chess, they offered to play games like Battleship, Twister, and more. They won, and in the end, Death became part of their band. William Sadler spoke with ComicBook‘s Chris Killian about his new movie, The Yeti, and the discussion went to the Bill & Ted franchise and whether he would ever return to his role of Death, and he revealed the one condition:
“I did play him again in the third one, Face the Music, which was great. And yeah, I would play him again… You mentioned the makeup, because I became, this is something I don’t tell everybody. I became allergic to makeup.”
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According to Sadler, he learned when he was working on Roswell that the makeup was making him itchy and his allergist pinpointed the makeup. Sadler didn’t just play Death in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, he also returned for a small role in Bill & Ted Face the Music. This appearance showed that Death had a falling out with Bill and Ted thanks to a lawsuit. In this scene, Bill and Ted die so they can possibly save and bring back their daughters, who were killed by a time-traveling robot named Dennis Caleb McCoy. They make up with Death, and he agrees to bring them and their daughters back from the dead.
Sadler said he never used makeup again until Face the Music, and when they put it on him, his face “blew up” again. He admitted that he would return to another Bill & Ted movie, but only if they could figure out a way to keep his face from “blowing up.”
In the same interview, the question of how Sadler came up with Death’s unique voice in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey also came up. When asked where he came up with the idea of Death, Sadler explained his inspiration. Sadler explained that he had performed in a play with a Czech actor named Jan Tลรญska, and that is where he came up with the accent. “He would land on the wrong syllable and use the wrong words, and it was just funny,” Sadler said. He then admitted the part that was the most fun was how Death went from being terrifying to becoming a really sore loser. “He just falls apart in front of your eyes,” Sadler said.
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