The co-star Paul Newman despised at first sight: “He was a cocky kid”
It might boil down to a bunch of people standing around pretending to be other people, but acting has always been intensely competitive. Many stars have grown increasingly protective of their spot and abhor the notion of a pretender to the throne coming for the crown, but that wasn’t really Paul Newman.
He was definitely one of his era’s biggest stars and most gifted performers, but he wasn’t covetous of his position on the A-list. If anything, he found it to be a pain in the arse, with Newman viewing himself as a theatre-trained thespian who moved into films, and not a Hollywood movie star.
Still, he became one anyway, even if most of his pictures were hardly designed with wide-ranging box office success in mind. He was a draw, though, and that was because of him. He didn’t make a tonne of commercial films because he didn’t want to, but since he was Paul Newman, people would show up and see them on the big screen anyway.
The blue-eyed icon never set his sights on being the talk of the town and the biggest deal in the business, but one of his eternal rivals did. Steve McQueen, five years Newman’s junior, was talented, ambitious, and driven by the ferocious desire to prove himself to anyone and everyone, and the precocious firebrand didn’t make the best first impression on his opposite number when they shot 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me.
It was only the second feature-length credit for both, but whereas Newman took top billing in the Rocky Graziano biopic, McQueen went uncredited. The former only ended up with the part because of James Dean’s death, and the latter was immediately envious.
“That was me,” he told Michael Munn. “That was almost my life. I should have had the part.” That was an awfully brash thing for an actor with precisely one film appearance under their belt, and as a guy trying to ring a doorbell in Girl on the Run, no less. Newman may have been something of a cinematic novice himself, but he had years of experience treading the boards, so McQueen never had a chance.
“I didn’t like Steve too much when I first met him,” the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid headliner confessed. “He wanted my part, and he made it clear. He was a cocky kid, but that’s what his part needed, and it was a good start for him in pictures.” Fast forward to 1970, and nothing had changed between them.
“I couldn’t afford to be his friend,” McQueen said. “He was ahead of me, and I had to catch up. I did. Now we’re the two biggest stars around, and I want to be bigger than him.” He didn’t even try to hide his competitiveness, which reached a head when they reunited onscreen for the first time in two decades to argue over who got the most lines and the most prominent spot on the poster in The Towering Inferno.
Things were as frosty as ever, with Newman and McQueen constantly trying to one-up and outdo each other, with The Great Escape favourite having been trying to overtake his arch-nemesis for nearly 20 years. He may have succeeded, but that depends entirely on who you ask.
