Working with Chevy Chase Gave the ‘Christmas Vacation’ Squirrel a Heart Attack
There are near countless stories about Chevy Chase being awful to work with — from his alleged racist outbursts on the set of Community, to the Saturday Night Live hosting gigs that found him making homophobic “jokes” about cast members, to the fact that he somehow managed to make puberty even worse for Anthony Michael Hall during the production of National Lampoon’s Vacation.
And now it turns out that someone actually died during the making of a Chase-starring classic. Although, we should probably clarify that the performer in question was a squirrel.
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As you may recall, in the third act of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the Griswold family’s Christmas tree is burnt to a crisp, prompting the increasingly unhinged Clark to cut one down from the yard and force it into his living room. Unfortunately, the tree is home to a squirrel who runs wild through their home.
As reported by Entertainment Weekly, when the cast of the holiday classic gathered at Fan Expo Chicago last month, Juliette Lewis, who played Audrey Griswold, recalled that the squirrel scene took a surprisingly long time to shoot. Her one-time movie mom Beverly D’Angelo then told Lewis that it was “’cause the first squirrel died. Did you know that? Because you were young.”
Lewis wasn’t aware that one of the squirrel actors had kicked the bucket. “The squirrel had a heart attack,” D’Angelo went on to explain. “So the squirrel that we ended up using was not the original squirrel. It was not trained. And Chevy ended up wearing a stuffed squirrel on his shoulder for everything but the leap at the camera. I’ve destroyed the magic.”
“That was sad,” Lewis agreed.
D’Angelo may have actually been underselling the behind-the-scenes chaos. As director Jeremiah Chechik revealed during a 2020 Rolling Stone interview, the squirrel that died on the set just before the shoot was specially trained. He didn’t specify whether or not it was a heart attack, as D’Angelo claimed, but he noted that the trainer told him “they don’t live that long.”
Did the brief time that the squirrel spent on the set of a Chevy Chase movie have any affect on the sudden fatality? We may never know for sure.
So the movie had to shoot the scene with an “untrained” squirrel. “It was just total chaos,” Chechik said. Diane Ladd, who played Clark’s mother, informed Rolling Stone that the director told her, “Diane, please get closer to the squirrel!” Meanwhile, the squirrel wrangler told her, “Diane, please don’t get closer to the squirrel. If someone screams or scares one, their claws are like razor blades.”
If only Chase had a wrangler that could similarly look out for the well-being of his co-stars.
