The 2002 blockbuster that was almost Paul Newman’s only horror movie: “Mr Newman declined”
As you’d probably expect from an actor who took their craft incredibly seriously, Paul Newman was never all that interested in telling far-fetched, far-flung, or fantastical stories on the silver screen.
He was a movie star through and through, much to his chagrin, but he achieved that by spending his career proving that he was better at his job than most of his peers and contemporaries. Even more to his chagrin, though, being a handsome fella with those piercing blue eyes certainly helped.
Newman’s aversion to high-concept cinema and the blockbusters that increasingly deluged the marketplace in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era can be neatly encapsulated by the fact that he only made four films that fit that particular bill, and he was harshly critical of three of them.
The Towering Inferno might have been a ‘Best Picture’ nominee and lives on as arguably the pinnacle of the 1970s disaster boom, but the star called it “a junk movie” that he only made for the money, and that compensation came in handy when he spent the whole production measuring his dick against Steve McQueen’s.
Just like everyone else, he was aware that Robert Altman’s Quintet was the drizzling shits, and he loathed master of disaster Irwin Allen’s When Time Ran Out so much that he managed to erase its name from his memory banks, although he remained cognisant that it was also a flaming dumpster fire of a flick.
He didn’t have anything to say about his fourth and final big-budget escapade, Cars, but that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, given Newman’s lifelong love of automobile racing, and he found his first voiceover performance in an animated feature to be a uniquely invigorating challenge.
One disaster film, two sci-fi duds, and a kids’ movie is the about the sum of his contributions to genre fare, but there could have been another, after M Night Shyamalan offered him the part of the widowed priest, Graham Hess, in Signs, the filmmaker’s follow-up to The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. He wasn’t the only iconic veteran who’d turned down the job, though, with Clint Eastwood declining due to a scheduling conflict.
Once the Color of Money, The Sting, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid legend said no, Shyamalan rewrote the part to make the character younger, with Mel Gibson drafted in. Describing Newman and Eastwood as “no-gos,” the twist-happy auteur explained his decision. “Mel was a natural after Mr Newman declined,” he offered. “They have the same kind of haunted eyes.”
Gibson, 30 years Newman’s junior, gladly accepted and was rewarded with one of the highest-grossing releases of 2002, after Signs soared past $400 million in ticket sales. Maybe his past experience with sci-fi put him off, but Shyamalan’s otherworldly chiller is as much a horror film as it is one about alien invaders, forever robbing audiences of the opportunity to see the Oscar-winning icon in what would have been his only foray into horror.
