Dante Basco looks back at filming 'Hook' on the 30th anniversary

Dante Basco who played Rufio in the 1991 film, Hook, talks to Yahoo Entertainment about what it was like working on the movie alongside Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman 30 years later.

Video Transcript

[CROWD CHANTS]

-- Rufio. Rufio. Rufio.

- Rufi--

- O.

ETHAN ALTER: Your entrance in "Hook" is iconic, Rufio coming in on the trolley and everything. Was that actually you? Did they let you actually do all that?

DANTE BASCO: Some of it was me and some it was one of our stunt guys. We had a few stunt guys-- Pat Romano who stunted me a bunch of things even before "Hook" and Ricky who did the trapeze stuff, which Ricky had a fall into the rocks one time, which the ambulance came. It was like [GASPS] a very scary moment. But I did get to ride the roller coaster a few times. And actually, the camera went haywire during one of the takes. I was like, oh, am I going to fall off this thing? [CHUCKLES]

But all the sword fighting in the film is me, which I'm very proud of-- months and months of swordplay training and rehearsing. That entrance, like you said, it's-- it's-- it's great to have an entrance in the film like that and a chant that has followed me around my whole life. To this day, I could just be walking through a mall and the whole crowd chanting the Rufio chant.

- Rufi--

- O.

DANTE BASCO: It's cool. Not everybody gets to have a chant and an entrance like that into pop culture.

PETER BANNING: Prison barber.

RUFIO: Mother lover.

PETER BANNING: Near-sighted gynecologist.

RUFIO: In your face, camel cake.

PETER BANNING: In your rear, cow cow derriére.

RUFIO: Lying, crying, spying, prying ultra pig.

PETER BANNING: You lewd, crude, rude bag of pre-chewed food dude.

THUD BUTT: Bangarang, Peter.

ETHAN ALTER: I have to ask about the rap battle at the food fight-- or the insult battle-- excuse me. It feels like an "8 Mile" scene. I love the way you go back and forth.

DANTE BASCO: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ETHAN ALTER: How much of that was improvised? How much did you come up with, like fart factory and all those stuff?

DANTE BASCO: No, on me, I did exactly what they wrote. Robin did everything. Robin did what they wrote. Robin-- a lot of the stuff, Robin is like-- when you work with Robin, you do with brilliant script. He'd do a brilliant-- and then he'd be like-- he'll just look at Steve and like, that means he gots one more. Can I do one my way? And then he'll just go. And then when you're acting with him, you have got pretty much three choices as an actor.

Like, you can, like, you know, say your lines. And then, you know, he can go and then you get steamrolled, or you can like try to improv with him, but he's like-- he's the Marlon Brando of improv. He's the greatest improver in the history of improving.

RUFIO: Hook.

CAPTAIN HOOK: Rufio.

ETHAN ALTER: I understand Dustin Hoffman was a real mentor to you on set as well. What's your favorite Dustin Hoffman moment-- memory?

DANTE BASCO: Dustin is a method actor, and so there was a long time within the shooting where he was being very adversarial to me, very adversarial. I remember going to my acting coach at the time going, I'm stressed out. Like, [INAUDIBLE]. OK, like, what am I doing? Like, this guy, he's Dustin Hoffman. Like, why is he in my ear being very adversarial, you know?

Like, I can't-- you know, I can't. You know, he's just saying things that I'm like, why would you say that to me? I'm just trying to be a good little actor? And my acting coach was like, you know, he's a method actor. He's Captain Hook. You're Rufio. You're his adversary. Like, he is setting it up right now. So when it's time to do the scenes with you, he doesn't play. He's serious, you know?

RUFIO: Lookie, lookie, I got Hookie.

PETER BANNING: Oh, no.

DANTE BASCO: One of my greatest memories is before my death scene about a week or two before then because we don't know if we're going to die or not. And they're like, OK, he's going to die. So I started knocking on people's doors and asking them for their advice. I do remember Bob Hoskins. I knocked on Bob Hoskins. I was like, hey, Bob. I can do my death scene. Like, I've never died.

And do you have any advice for me? And Bob was like, well, you know, you got to stop breathing, right? Stop breathing. I was like, OK. [LAUGHS] I love Bob Hoskins. He's great. When I got to Dustin, he was like, kid, when are you shooting the scene? I was like, this, you know-- next Wednesday. He was like, I'll be there. And then he became my-- he became, you know, my acting coach for those days on set.

I mean, we literally did it for like two or three days. He was there every day kind of my acting coach, you know, in a sense, directing me as an acting coach through the death scene. And it was you get to act that intimately one of your heroes is phenomenal.

ETHAN ALTER: There's a world in which Rufio would have lived. I one desperately wanted you to live. What was that--

DANTE BASCO: Yeah.

ETHAN ALTER: I mean, do you wish you had lived? Do you wish we'd gotten that cut? Or what-- you know, how do you feel about--

DANTE BASCO: Part of me wishes-- yeah, there was a talk of a Lost Boy show. We were in the context of trying to do it at one time or another, and it didn't go through. And then I remember, we didn't go-- I don't know. Something happened where I didn't sign the contract at the time that they killed me. I was like, I wonder if that was the reason. But then years later, I talked to JV Hart who'd become a really good friend of mine and like, you know, one of the producers and the writer of the original script.

He said, I always wanted Rufio to die. I always wanted Rufio to die because it just represented the darkness and the danger in Neverland. Until then, with all the kids and the chicken and the eggs and the marbles and the gumballs, great. But in order for Peter Pan to go, like, I need to get my kids out of Neverland, there needed to be something dire. And so the death of Rufio, which comes out of nowhere.

You could tell that they didn't know which way they can go because all of a sudden comes out of nowhere, which really freaked out a whole generation of kids. I mean, I read someone else's blog about the death of Rufio was like their first-- and first for a whole generation of kids between like eight and 12 that watched-- you know, watched this movie in the movie theater with their family, like on a Saturday afternoon.

Like, that was the first traumatic moments of our life, to see a kid get killed in a kids movie out of nowhere. But I also think that's one of the things that kind of made Rufio iconic in its own way, you know? The death of Rufio has like solidified him as like this thing that you'll always remember.

ETHAN ALTER: It's the Bambi's mom that-- you know, you're Bambi's mom, Rufio, you know.

DANTE BASCO: It's Bambi-- it's Bambi's mom. I'm-- I'm a version of Bambi's mom, exactly.

BAMBI: We made it, mother. Wait, mother?

DANTE BASCO: A lot of times, when I talk to Asian-American groups or societies, you know, I got the biggest thing about about Rufio is when you talk about what representation is and how this works, right? So Peter Pan is not even an IP. It's a fairy tale. Peter Pan and the Lost Boys never Neverland had been around longer than anyone in the world has been alive.

And it's going to be around longer than any of us here now. And we're still going to be here. And somehow, in 1991, when Steven Spielberg decided to cast me to play the leader of this new Lost Boy crew in his movie, rendition of the Peter Pan story, all of a sudden, a Filipino kid becomes canon in this fairy tale. And now, I get pictures all the time people going to Disneyland or cons cosplaying as a group, and someone is dressed up as Captain Hook and someone is dressed up as Peter Pan and someone's Tinkerbell and maybe a crocodile.

And someone is representing this little Filipino character. And there's always a place for a person of color there. Whether you are or not, you're representing that. You know that's what you're representing. And somehow, a Filipino kid became canon in Peter Pan. Ethan, that's crazy. That's-- I mean, that goes beyond-- I made it into a fairy tale.

ETHAN ALTER: Yeah.