Did Steve McQueen actually jump the fence on a motorbike in ‘The Great Escape’?
For an actor who fully deserves to be nicknamed the ‘King of Cool’, Steve McQueen never felt so assured of his position in Hollywood that he steered away from using underhanded tactics to steal the spotlight.
He was the second-billed name in classic western The Magnificent Seven behind Yul Brynner, but he didn’t act like it. McQueen would go out of his way to add unscripted flourishes to the character of Vin Tanner, designed entirely to draw the audience’s eyes away from his co-stars and onto him.
The battle for supremacy between McQueen and Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno has become the stuff of legend, too, with each A-lister refusing to give an inch. As a result, they had the exact same amount of dialogue, and the credits would bill each man first depending entirely on how they were read on the screen by any given viewer.
It was pettiness at its finest, but McQueen hardly needed to try and hog the limelight when he was doing just fine on his own. After all, he was electric in Bullitt, intoxicating in The Thomas Crown Affair, Academy Award-nominated for The Sand Pebbles, and magnetic in The Getaway, Papillon, and many more.
Despite the countless great movies he appeared in, naming the single most iconic moment in McQueen’s filmography largely boils down to a two-horse race. In one corner, there’s the seminal car chase from the aforementioned Bullitt, and in the other, there’s the legendary bike jump from The Great Escape.
Two indelible sequences ingrained into the cinematic consciousness, without a doubt, but they unfolded by completely different means.
Did Steve McQueen do the bike jump in The Great Escape?
In a word, no. At least, he didn’t on film. McQueen was ready, willing, and believed himself fully capable of pulling it off, but insurance purposes prevented him from actually pulling off the dangerous feat himself. Instead, the honour fell to his friend and stuntman, Bud Ekins, but the star wanted to prove he could do it anyway.
That being said, there are conflicting stories. Stunt performer Tim Gibbes told The Daily Mail that “it wasn’t a stunt Steve McQueen could have attempted, and the film crew wouldn’t have let him do it anyway as they had to ensure a big star like him didn’t get injured.”
However, second unit director Robert Relyea claimed that both McQueen and Gibbes had actually pulled off the exact same stunt seen in the final cut just to see if they could do it, and he was adamant each of them had accomplished the death-defying feat to such an impressive extent that any one of the three could have done it again when the cameras were rolling.
He didn’t sit out the entire set pieces, though, with McQueen a skilled rider who hopped onto the Triumph motorcycle to shoot great swathes of the chase itself, even if launching himself over a fence was deemed too much of an insurance risk were anything to go awry.
It wasn’t McQueen to jumped the bike on camera, then, but the second unit director of The Great Escape says he did it for shits and giggles during his downtime. Technically, that means he did it himself, just not when anybody was rolling the cameras, and definitely not when director John Sturges was marshalling the action.
