As he is considered to be the best Jason Voorhees by most fans of the Friday the 13th franchise, Kane Hodder was outwardly disappointed by his not being cast as Jason in Freddy vs. Jason; the stuntman and actor managed to make the final cut anyway.
Ronny Yu's Freddy vs. Jason (2003) brought fans the highly-anticipated grudge match between two iconic horror franchise killers: Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street (Robert Englund) and Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger). Not only has Kane Hodder played Jason more times than any other actor, and had a long-standing friendship—and playfully acted rivalry—with Robert Englund, who played Freddy in every A Nightmare on Elm Street movie except the 2010 remake, which replaced him with Jackie Earle Haley. While the decision not to cast Hodder as Jason was mostly due to the director's aesthetic preference to have Kirzinger—who is 6'5", two inches taller than Hodder—tower over the 5'9" Englund.
However, in a true moment of circumstance, Hodder made it into Freddy vs. Jason after all. The actor was vocal about his disappointment and the fans' disappointment that he didn't get to play out the big fight between Freddy and Jason on the big screen. Yu maintains that the decision to cast Kirzinger was New Line's decision, but the franchise's creator, Sean S. Cunningham disagreed that Kirzinger was the better choice. Perhaps Hodder was meant to be in the movie after all—it would explain the random aspect of his cameo role.
How Kane Hodder Made It Into Freddy vs. Jason After All
Hodder mentioned his cameo in an interview with We Got This Covered back in 2018. According to Hodder, even the filmmakers weren't aware that he made it into the movie's final cut. Said Hodder, "there was a scene where they're at the insane asylum or whatever, the hospital, and there's a movie playing on a TV set—and it happens to be Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3". He went on to explain that he was a stunt performer in the 1990 as Leatherface for R.A. Mihailoff; he was also the film's stunt coordinator. Hodder began as a stunt performer in the 1980s and has done stunts in over 50 movies.
Despite his professionalism and skill as a stunt performer, Hodder managed to sustain 2nd and 3rd degree burns over a large portion of his body from a full-body burn stunt gone wrong. For a moment, he was considered to play Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street because of these burns. Despite the traumatic experience, Hodder still agreed to do another full-body burn stunt in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and set a Guinness World Record for being fully on fire for an astonishing 44 seconds.
While it wasn't quite what fans of Hodder's Jason Voorhees wanted, it's a fun piece of trivia that connects the actor to one of the finest collaborations between two horror movie franchises. Freddy vs. Jason may not have started the interconnected universe that some expected it might—and shared universes haven't worked well for horror movies in general—but it was a treat for slasher movie fans, and delivered on a long-standing promise to have two titans of the genre duking it out.