The cast member who “never forgave” Steve McQueen
Assembling a star-studded cast can often backfire, given the size of the egos being crammed together into the same ensemble, with Steve McQueen making life particularly difficult for one of his co-stars on the set of a classic.
Mounting a remake of one of the greatest movies ever made comes with its own unique set of pressures, but repurposing Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai for Hollywood proved to be an inspired decision when John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven gained equally legendary status in the pantheons of cinema history.
McQueen was arguably the biggest star involved in the production, but it was Yul Brynner who played the leading role and took top billing as Chris Adams, the erstwhile leader of the titular septet. Inevitably, bad blood brewed between the two, with the constant one-upmanship between the two actors creating plenty of tension during shooting.
After discovering that his dialogue and screen time was significantly less than that of his counterpart, McQueen went out of his way to try to upstage Brynner at every turn. When the latter was speaking on camera, the former would add improvised flourishes while standing in the background to try and siphon the attention away from the focal point of the scene.
Being famously sensitive about his height, Brynner would create mounds of dirt to stand on so that he would appear taller next to his colleagues, with McQueen regularly responding in kind by flattening them, although he attributed the simmering resentment between the two as little more than a comfort issue.
“We didn’t get along. Brynner came up to me in front of a lot of people and grabbed me by the shoulder. He was mad about something,” McQueen said. “He doesn’t ride well and knows nothing about guns, so maybe he thought I represented a threat. I was in my element. He wasn’t. When you work in a scene with Yul, you’re supposed to stand perfectly still, 10 feet away. Well, I don’t work that way.”
The Magnificent Seven turned out just fine despite the petty squabbling of its two most prominent names, which irritated the rest of the group, too. Charles Bronson “never forgave” McQueen for his unnecessary behaviour even though they’d work together again on The Great Escape in 1963, not that it stopped him from branding the star as not being “a real professional” for the way he’d constantly seek to undermine anyone he believed was in danger of stealing the spotlight.
Brynner and McQueen eventually made amends decades later, but Bronson wasn’t quite as easily swayed. The Magnificent Seven remains an incredible movie, but watching it, there’s barely a scene where McQueen isn’t doing something designed to draw the viewer’s eyes away from elsewhere in the frame.
