The actor who turned down the chance to end Jack Nicholson’s retirement: “No, we’re not”
Jack Nicholson has defined decades of cinema history with his eternally influential performances in the likes of Five Easy Pieces, The Shining and Chinatown. He became one of the golden boys of the 1970s with an unprecedented streak of successful films, working with some of the most prolific directors of the time. In the final years of his professional life, the actor starred in films such as I’m Still Here, The Departed and About Schmidt, but there was one project that nearly lured him out of retirement in 2014 until the plans were thwarted by one other actor.
The Judge, directed by David Dobkin in 2014, follows a successful lawyer who returns to his hometown for his mother’s funeral, only to discover that his estranged father, a local judge, has been accused of murder. Robert Downey Jr and Robert Duvall star in the project, alongside Vera Farmiga, Jeremy Strong and Dax Shepard. However, the cast was nearly completely different, with the director initially approaching Nicholson for the role that Duvall later played.
When discussing the production process, Dobkin explained that they had two meetings with Nicholson while casting the project. While this may have seemed like a golden ticket to success for the director, with very few projects being able to tempt the legendary actor after entering his years of rest and relaxation, it did not go according to plan.
Nicholson suggested multiple rewrites of the script, with the director being dubious about making these changes after having worked on the script for two years and completed it. Dobkin explained, “He wanted the script rewritten much more than we did, which was a concern. So we went back, Robert [Downey Jr] and I, we sat with him again. Then we just had to realise we just felt like defending the material. We were concerned with where we would had to have gone to get Jack happy.”
Adding, “I had Robert in, and we were off to the races, and we were basically green-lit on the movie, so I didn’t want to go back into writing. But they were really fun conversations. Jack is a hell of a storyteller. It was a different movie. It wasn’t right or wrong notes; it was a little bit different. A little more isolated. A little smaller. Less of the brothers. A little less of what was going on. It was a very interesting film”.
While the film would have ended up going in a different direction with Nicholson on board, who knows how the project might have looked had he applied those changes. However, the process of adapting the script was too intimidating, and it was actually Downey Jr who suggested they run with Duvall instead.
Dobkin elaborated, “But right after that, I remember walking out of his house with Robert and looking at him and saying, ‘I don’t know’. We had been working on that script for two years. I was like, ‘I don’t know if we can go back to writing’. He was like, ‘No, we’re not. Who’s next?’ I was like, ‘It’s gotta be Bobby Duvall’. He’s like, ‘Alright’. And that’s how it happened. It was a one-two thing.”
If Downey Jr hadn’t suggested that they work with Duvall, who knows if the director would have eventually implemented these suggestions in order to secure the chance to work with Nicholson. But alas, this never happened, and The Judge did not end up being the film to lure the esteemed actor out of retirement, no matter how monumental that might have been.
