Audition terror: How Richard Donner found his Damien for ‘The Omen’
There are some horror movies that transcend the screen from which they come into a state of genuine iconic status, and it’s fair to say that Richard Donner’s 1976 supernatural horror movie The Omen, a visionary tale of terror and hellish curiosity, is deserving of its place in such a category.
Gregory Peck plays a wealthy diplomat who unwittingly adopts a young child, replacing his dead biological son at birth without his wife’s knowledge, who seems to be the cause of a series of strange events and violent deaths as he grows up. The young boy, Damien, is revealed to be the Biblically prophesied Antichrist.
Now, most horror movies need an antagonist, which often leads to a widespread search to find the right actor to portray them. However, The Omen had to fight with the challenge of its villain being a young child, so the quest to find a suitable young boy was made all the more difficult, at least until the producers settled on five-year-old actor Harvey Stevens.
The horror classic was Stevens’ first big screen role and saw him portray the Antichrist reborn child of Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. But how did Stevens impress the casting team for The Omen despite having little prior acting experience? Well, it all came down to his sheer terror and attitude during the casting process.
In a group audition of 500 male children, Richard Donner asked each of the prospective little Damiens to attack him in the way they would later be required to attack Lee Remick’s mother character, Katharine, in a church in the film. It was Stephens who left the biggest impression on the director, though, going a step further by clawing at his face and kicking him in the crown jewels.
After the pain subsided in Donner, he chose to cast Stephens in the role of Damien, although he decided to alter his hair from curly and blonde to straight and black in order to give him a scarier appearance. Such moves worked for Stephens’ effort in The Omen, which has haunted cultural consciousness ever since the film was released in 1976.
Stephens never looked back after his successful audition either and continued to cause terror on set as well as on screen. Producer Harvey Bernhard once remembered, “On the first day of shooting, he came up to director Dick Donner, hit him and split his lip. Then he butted into the cameraman and knocked him down. He was a tiger during the entire production.”
If things in production were bad, then Stephens had no intention of being a little tearaway once it had wrapped and just a few hours after returning to school, the young actor’s parents were informed that he had beaten up one of his classmates. The Omen ended up Stephens’ only major film role – though he later played a small part in the 1980 film Gauguin the Savage.
In Stephens, though, The Omen had its perfect antagonist – a child with the appearance of honesty and innocence but with a fearsome look in his eyes that just spelt evil and the attitude to match. The Omen remains a true classic of horror cinema, and Stephens’ portrayal of the reborn Antichrist in Damien has become part of its rich history.
Check out the trailer for The Omen below.
