Why did Ken Wahl's career go right down the shitter?

Was it because Bette Midler hated him so much and had him black listed?

He was at one point one of the hottest actors in Hollywood

Why did she hate him (if that is indeed true)?

He got fat during the second season of Wiseguy and lost his looks.

I remember seeing the film they made together, and it was actually kind of fun. There were all sorts of things in the newspapers about Bette hating him, apparently he didn't treat her well during the filming. I forget the details though.

He never appeared especially bright, on or offscreen, but he had IT--sex appeal in spades. His TV show WISEGUY was very entertaining and he was good on it.

I take Bette Midler's takes on her co-stars with a grain of salt. The numbers of actors and colleagues she has pissed off, alienated, and treated poorly are LEGION.

Jinxed! was a jinx for everyone involved, but both Wahl and Midler recovered a few years later with Wiseguy and Ruthless People.

I read that Ken gave an interview where he said when he kissed Bette Midler he had to think of his dog to get thru it or something like that.

Wahl is still a beautiful man.

Midler with play Bella Abzug to Julianne Moore's Gloria Steinem later this year. How will she compare with Harvey Fierstein?

Also... drugs, OP. Many, many drugs.

Allegedly.

he's my facebook friend..he married one of the Barbie twins and screws the other sister. He's a big animal activists and a trumpster now

This thread is no good without pics...

I think another problem with Jinxed! was the choice of director Don Siegel. Midler famously got him back when she used the experience for a scene in Beaches.

Bette couldn't stand him. She said he was a lousy person and every other word out of his mouth was some slur against gays or non-whites.

R16, considering he’s a Trumpster, I believe that totally.

Ken Wahl's looks and weight didn't change noticeably in Wiseguy's two-year run before the follow-up short season with Steven Bauer, [R2]. Whatever happened to him physically was afterwards.

Not only did he marry one Barbi twin and, with her permission, screws the other Barbi twin, but Wahl suggested an incestuous 3-way with them. IIRC a Howard Stern interview with one of the twins.

A fucked up guy.

R18, I remember seeing wardrobe tricks to cover his growing girth. They added a layer to his shirts and raised the belt line. His action scenes were hilarious by the end.

That’s what stopped his career. Whatever The National Enquirer wrote about him turned old farts against him.

He said Bette Midler was ugly and that it was torture kissing her.

lord, it probably was r21

Barbie Twins, motorcycle accident, drugs, got fat, drugs. A tale as old as time.

Wiseguy was such a good series. I wouldn't mind a reboot of that on a streaming service.

[quote]Wiseguy was such a good series. I wouldn't mind a reboot of that on a streaming service.

Not a reboot, but Tubi has the series.

I want to know why Michael "The Pretender" Weiss kinda faded out. I dated a french guy that looked just like him.

This guy was never on my radar, and I had no clue he existed. Perhaps I was too young. But I looked at his photos online for about 10 minutes, before falling back asleep. I’m running a fever, have a sinus infection, and have been in bed for the last few days.

Anyhow, I fell asleep, and suddenly, I’m dreaming that this guy and I are living together, and in a full on relationship. In my dream, he drove a truck, and worked as a carpenter, and general contractor. He was really sweet, and his best friend came over for dinner all the time, because he was single, and didn’t know how to cook.

What a weird dream! It was really detailed, and completely logical. No abstract stuff. Well, except for the “Watcher”.

I always have this one person watching me, whenever I dream of ex-boyfriends, or about my ex husband. He was watching me with this Ken guy, and today, for the first time ever, I finally saw his face in my dream, and know who he is. That freaks me out even more, because I had no idea my “watcher” or my “observer” in my dream was a person identifiable as other than myself. I always suspected it was not me, because it felt like it wasn’t me, but today, I saw his face, and it wasn’t me - even though I know philosophy and psychology literature tells me that it probably is.

Weird. This guy isn’t even my type. I like brown hair brown eyes.

I remember Liz Smith (circa 1989) bitched in her column that everyone was talking about Delta Burke's weight, so it was only fair to point out Ken Wahl's weight gain too.

R23 covered it well. Not only was he brutal to our Divine Miss M but he became impossible to work with on the tv show due to ¨ back pain and personal demons¨.- I loved that show´s casting - so many great guest appearances ... Spacey´s ¨the toes knows¨.

Why is Ken Wahl virtually un-Googleable now? Even if you Google "Ken Wahl actor" -- crickets.

R30, maybe because he hasn’t had any work in the last 20 plus years?

He became a bloated mess and married one of the Barbi twins who shared him.

[quote] He got fat during the second season of Wiseguy and lost his looks.

Imagine, getting fat and losing your looks!

Why did Michael Weiss burn out? Oh that one's easy. Crysta! Meth. Lots and lots and lots of crystal meth.

Ken Wahl was also accident prone having suffered a bad motorcycle crash in 1984 and falling down a flight of marble stairs in 1992. The ensuing botched surgeries, chronic pain and the addiction to painkillers and alcohol didn't help him or his career.

There are no pics from him today. Anyone have some recent pics?

"Accident prone' is publicist lingo for 'totally fucking wasted'.

Whoever this dude is, I’m glad I perused his photos and dreamed of his 1980s self, and myself, because I got to see my Watcher, who, by the way, IS my type, and whom I’m really into.

Weird. I wonder if when we dream, we go into an alternative reality? Dreams really do reveal things about ourselves that no amount of therapy ever will.

a "recent" photo from 2015

^He turned into a fat Tom Wopat?

Oh noooooo, R39. Oh nooooooo!

a "recent" publicity photo, date unknown.

That is not him. No way. That guy at r39 is actually pulled together—and sober (looking). . I don’t think Ken Wahl is anything close to that.

Where to learn my re able ur the Watcher or the Observer...

Correction:

Where to learn more about the Watcher or the Observer....

If those recent photos really are Wahl, they still can't erase my memory of his dreamy perfection in better days.

Neither of those "recent" pics are of him.

R48 Yes Ken, we understand your concern!

He was once hot enough for this Nissan 240 commercial:

Here's a scene from Wiseguy where it looks like he's about to rear-end Kevin Spacey...

He was so beautiful. Everyone thought so, as I recall.

Isn’t it common knowledge that he had very serious drug issues, which quickly killed whatever momentum his career had at that point?

Who was that guy on Wiseguy who died of AIDS? I thought that was Ken Wahl.

16 pounds and you go to nifty story material - “My Plumber’s Ass Smiled At Me”.

[quote]Who was that guy on Wiseguy who died of AIDS?

That was Ray Sharkey, who played Sonny Steelgrave in the first season.

sadly he's a right wing asshole. His twitter is a mess

barbie twins jinxed him, he was a hot piece of ass till they got hold of him.

R59 his right wing views are his own

He had a supporting role in [italic]the Favor[/italic], about a married woman who dreams about her high-school boyfriend (Wahl) and their unconsummated relationship. She asks her best friend to visit him and report back. One of the dream sequences is hilarious. Wahl still looked pretty good at that point, 1994. I think this movie was shelved and finally released when Brad Pitt's career took off; he has a small role as the best friend's boyfriend.

Did he ever get naked for the camera?

It was actually Bette Midler, not Ken Wahl, who was (temporarily) "blacklisted" following the troubled making of the flop comedy "Jinxed!"

It was one of those movies where reports from the set about fights and tension kept leaking to the press during filming, which nearly always spells doom for a movie; it just puts a stink on the whole thing and primes the critics and the public to hate the movie before they've even seen it. In actuality, "Jinxed" wasn't that bad at all, from what I can recall. It wasn't great, but it was nowhere near as awful as it was made out to be at the time.

Anyway, the scoop was that Bette was getting over-involved in everything: the script, the directing, etc. She wasn't being a good little actress and doing what she was told, which led to the director and Ken Wahl both HATING her and bad-mouthing her. The result was that Midler was labeled "difficult" and didn't land another movie role for several years, until the director of "Down and Out in Beverly Hills" decided to take a chance on her, and wound up reviving her film career in a big way. It was a big, unexpected hit, and the critics and audiences loved Bette, which led to her string of successful 80's comedies. At the time of "Beverly HIlls", she was publicly VERY grateful for having been given a second chance, and basically said that she'd learned her lesson about how the game was played, and that from then on, she would just show up on time, do the job she was hired to do, and trust that the directors, writers, and producers knew what they were doing.

Because Hollywood already had Matt Dillon. They didn't need another one.

R61. I saw The Favor ina theater. I was the only person there. I had a Ken Wahl thing, what a waste of a beautiful man. Drugs are bad mkay.

He was always ugly. I never understood his appeal.

R51 Thanks for reminding me about that commercial- I think that may have been the only thing I saw him in in the 1980s since I never watched Wiseguy.

But that link is dead, so I found another one:

R62 There was a scene in The Wanderers where you can see his ass...and I think his dick from a distance, IIRC.

R39 Boy, wifey was sure johnny-on-the-spot with her "THAT'S NOT HIM! I SHOULD KNOW, I'M MARRIED TO HIM" rebuke to that twitter post, lol!

What a nut-case she is. Doesn't she have anything better to do? Seems like a total control freak. Poor Ken. I'll bet he's completely sick of her ass by now. He'd kinda trapped, though. She got her claws into him when he was vulnerable.

Because he is an inbred looking uggo.

According to Rolling Stone, he tried to strangle Bette during one of their fights. It apparently got really ugly between them.

Bette checked herself into a hospital for "physical exhaustion" during the movie, but the truth was that she had a nervous breakdown and required psychiatric treatment.

R72 Interesting. I'll have to see if I can find that article.

I want to see Fat Ken. The Barbi Twins must hate his weight gain. They were obsessively bulimic. They'd only eat ice cream for days because it was so easy to throw up. Also a fact gleaned from their Stern interview. It sounded like a whole hive of crazy with Ken being the craziest.

R74 I want to see Fat Ken too, lol. I bet he still looks better than the freaky twins whose eyes are too close together (notice how their faces are always photographed from the side...)

But I find it hard to believe that Ken fucks both of them, and that they'd admit it in public if he did. That sounds like some of Stern's own sophomoric speculation.

R74 The wife probably likes him fat, because it keeps him dependent on her, and she doesn't have to worry about him going around screwing women half her age.

He was gorgeous in "The Soldier".

R76 since when did that stop a man cheating

R23, like this one? I can't even imagine Busey and Stroud together. Yikes.

JFC, Sharkey sounds like a royal POS.

R80 Yeah, he got HIV from IV drug use, and then slept with a bunch of women, knowingly infecting them. One of them tried to sue him before he died, but he was broke.

He was a major fucked-up individual.

R30 Really? I get a ton of photos when I search him.

Midler didn't have the power to blacklist him, not then.

I think we should get together a DL search party to go find him. He's in Tucson somewhere, right? I want to know what the Barbi sisters have done with him!

R20 Career suicide by fork. Matthew Leblanc too.

R84 No, I think he's in CA.

He posts on FB and Twitter often...if that's really him...

There must be somebody who lives near him who can snap a pic when he's pumping gas! Jesus, how hard can it be?

He's REALLY changed since his heyday.

R13 R19 This is probably where those rumors started. I take it with a grain of salt, because the twins were getting pretty desperate for publicity at this point and Ken was suicidally-depressed and drinking heavily. I actually think both twins are lesbians and he doesn't sleep with either of them. He may even be impotent because of his injuries (which is not uncommon with neck/spinal injuries). I think they have an agreement where Shane takes care of him, she gets to be "Mrs. Ken Wahl" and the sister is along for the ride. It's a fucked-up scenario, regardless of the details (mainly because of the twins, because they are WEIRD).

"THE buxom BARBI TWINS, who shot to fame by posing nude for Playboy, even share a HUSBAND in bed.

The lucky man is movie star Ken Wahl, who's married to 37-year-old Shane Barbi - but shares bedtime romps with her sister, Sia.

'Sia and I are like the same person,' says Shane. 'So it seems fitting that we share things we both enjoy, including my husband.'

It's the second time the Playboy twins have shocked the world.

Recently they told how they had been brought up by a lesbian 'husband and wife' - and even had a gay godmother, the late pop star Dusty Springfield.

'The only dysfunctional part of our growing up was having to keep it a secret from the world. But there's nothing to be ashamed of,' says Shane."

R88 Ken had NOTHING to do with that. That was a stunt cooked up by the Zombi Twins to resuscitate their sagging (pun intended) careers. Ken didn't take those photos, either.

Ken is no longer allowed to do any podcast interviews, because it was leading to job offers that he wanted to take, and that was a big "no-no" for his wife. So-- no more interviews, no more jobs, no more social media (she pretends to be him online). For all intents and purposes, he's essentially being held hostage. I wish his fans knew about this, it's very sad.

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