“Those are my legs”: how a British electrician became Jack Nicholson’s body double
Making a movie requires a lot of magic. There’s a lot of trickery involved, a lot of manipulation, a lot of fabrication. But you’d never know. That’s the magic of it all.
Stanley Kubrick was a master of making a good film; there’s no denying that. But the director knew that when you’ve got time constraints and a budget to work with, even he couldn’t afford to mess about. He might’ve asserted himself as one of the most visionary filmmakers of all time, but that didn’t give him a free pass to ignore the rules and regulations that kept Hollywood afloat.
Well, to be fair, he did get a lot more leeway than others, what with his reputation as an intense and rather tyrannical filmmaker, but still, he knew he didn’t have unlimited time to make a movie. There’s always going to be studio champs and producers breathing down a filmmaker’s neck, even Kubrick’s. So, that’s how an electrician ended up being a body double for Jack Nicholson.
It was 1979, and Kubrick had cast Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining, his adaptation of Stephen King’s recent novel – filming took place in Hertfordshire’s Elstree Studios, despite its snowy American setting, and as a result, much of the crew were British, and this included the electricians employed to work on the set, such as Bobby Tanswell. He ended up getting much more than he bargained for when he took on the job, however, because Nicholson was soon in need of a body double, and Kubrick saw similarities in the pair.
It’s a comical story, actually, because Tanswell pretty much only got this small glimpse of Hollywood stardom because of Nicholson’s audacity. “One time, Jack said he had done his back in and needed a few days off,” Tanswell wrote for The Guardian. “That’s a lot of time when you’re shooting a big film, but Stanley said OK. The next day, we were in the sparks room watching Wimbledon when Stanley walks in. He asks what we’re up to, and as he turns to look at the telly, there he is: Jack Nicholson sat in the crowd with a girl on either side. Stanley went mad“.
With Nicholson absent, Kubrick got to work filming scenes that didn’t require the actor’s face, so he roped in Tanswell to be his body double. Considering that Tanswell was just a young working-class Londoner working as an electrician, this was quite the career switch-up.
“It was a small crew, and he used us for bit parts. Because they rarely shoot leading artists when you can’t see their face, he said to me, ‘You look like Jack – put on the jeans and boots.’ In the film, when a semi-conscious Jack is dragged into the food store, those are my legs on screen,” Tanswell explained.
While he might have only had a small role, it’s body doubles like this that keep film productions running smoothly and efficiently. Tanswell was actually asked to do more than just stand in for Nicholson, but he wasn’t having it. He was just an electrician, after all.
Continuing, he revealed, “He asked me to be the guy in a bear suit with his arse hanging out and his head in a man’s lap at the end. But I said: ‘No, mate, I ain’t having that.’ Could you imagine? Everyone at home saying, ‘That’s Bobby Tanswell.’ Nope, sorry.”
