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1985’s Spies Like Us captured the peak of mid-80s comedy thanks to the wonderful comic energy and chemistry of stars Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase. Directed by John Landis, the film sees Chase play the fast-talking Emmett Fitz-Hume while Aykroyd plays the brilliant tech-geek Austin Millbarge. Unfortunately for these two bumbling, low-level intelligence agents, they’re sent into the Soviet Union as unwitting decoys.
The project had a poignant history before it ever hit the big screen. Originating from a script co-written by Aykroyd and Dave Thomas, it was initially conceived at Universal as a vehicle for Aykroyd and his close friend and Saturday Night Live co-star, John Belushi. Following Belushi’s tragic death in 1982, the project went into turnaround. It was later picked up by Warner Bros., with Chevy Chase stepping into the co-lead role alongside Aykroyd.
Conceived as an affectionate homage to the classic Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road to…” comedy films, Spies Like Us embraced a classic double-act dynamic. Fittingly, Hope himself makes a memorable cameo appearance. Landis also packed the movie with legendary bitparts for fellow directors, including Terry Gilliam, Sam Raimi, Costa-Gavras, Martin Brest, Frank Oz, and Joel Coen, alongside blues giant B.B. King and visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen.
Production took the cast and crew across global landscapes. Cold War Russia was doubled by the freezing, isolated wilderness near Sognefjord in Norway, while the vast expanse of the Sahara stood in for Pakistan. Unsurprisingly, shooting on location in remote deserts spawned wild off-screen chaos.
High-speed chases and Moroccan standoffs
One of the funniest stories from the set was recently retold by Chase in a social media video, in which he remembered a particularly hairy moment in the Saharan desert.
“Danny and I were on a camel. It’s kind of funny because you’re just in the Sahara. You’re lost. It was just the crew, and we’re in the middle of the desert,” he says. “As the shot was ending, I looked up over the tip of the desert and there were these soldiers. They were Moroccan soldiers, and they had rifles. Danny had this huge camera — this beautiful, expensive camera — and he starts taking pictures of them.
“They started screaming and shouting, and Danny goes, ‘Drive! Drive!’ So I slammed on the gas. We were in a Jeep, going about 75 miles an hour over open sand dunes, with these guys chasing us in their own military trucks. We eventually tore back into the hotel parking lot, abandoned the Jeep, and dove into a Volkswagen bus with curtains drawn to hide. The trucks drove right past us.”
While the adrenaline-pumping chase across the dunes was real, the aftermath proved to be an entirely different operational manoeuvre masterminded by his co-star and director. “The next day on set, John Landis came up to me completely white-faced and said, ‘Chevy, Dan was arrested last night. He’s in a Marrakech prison,” Chase remembers. “The military authorities are on their way here right now to arrest you.’ I was completely terrified. I sat there sweating, waiting to be taken to a Moroccan jail. Suddenly, John and Danny burst into the room laughing hysterically. They had set the whole thing up to prank me.”
Although contemporary reviews were mixed, the movie was a major box-office hit, grossing over $77 million. And its cultural footprint has endured for decades, most notably in 2009, when the animated sitcom Family Guy aired the homage episode Spies Reminiscent of Us. Featuring both Aykroyd and Chase in guest-starring roles as fictionalised versions of themselves, the episode playfully claimed President Ronald Reagan was so impressed by Spies Like Us that he recruited them as actual covert intelligence agents.
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