“I discussed this only with her”: the legendary Jack Nicholson performance only two people understood
Common sense would indicate a performance that blew audiences away and left critics falling over themselves to shower it with praise would be one that resonated with viewers from all walks of life, but that wasn’t the case with one of the many legendary turns Jack Nicholson delivered throughout his career.
In fact, the actor accounted for 50% of the people who understood why he approached his work in the way that he did, and it’s hard to argue with the results of such a secretive method. Watching the film in question, nobody can deny that it’s a work of performative genius, but it might be even better than history remembers it knowing the lengths Nicholson went to in order to internalise his character’s strife.
The second winner of the ‘Big Five’ at the Academy Awards after taking home the trophies for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, Miloš Forman’s seminal psychological drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is lauded as a masterpiece of modern American cinema, a reputation that’s been bulletproof since it first premiered in November 1975.
Nicholson won his first Oscar at the fifth attempt for bringing Randall P McMurphy to unforgettable life, with the prisoner being transferred to a psychiatric institution in the hopes of enjoying a less inhibiting incarceration, only to discover he’s met his match in Louise Fletcher’s domineering and downright terrifying Nurse Ratched.
Fletcher was only cast at the last minute, but she was still the only other person let in on the ground floor of Nicholson’s interpretation of the protagonist. From the outside looking in, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a battle of wits and wills between the two principal players in the narrative, but the leading man didn’t quite see it the same way, even if he went to great pains to ensure word never filtered out.
As Nicholson revealed to The New York Times, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was actually a love story. Well, sort of, with the three-time Oscar-winning icon admitting that only Fletcher was informed that from the actor’s perspective, McMurphy had made it his mission to try and seduce Ratched.
“I discussed this only with her,” he said. “That’s what I felt was actually happening with the character; it was one long, unsuccessful seduction, which the guy was so pathologically sure of.” Not many people would point to the movie and suggest that there’s sexual tension and sparks aplenty between the two nemeses, but that was how Nicholson opted to play the part.
Hardly cinema’s most conventional love story by any stretch, especially when Nicholson and Fletcher were the only people involved with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on either side of the camera – and in the crowd once it was released – who knew that McMurphy was playing a seductive long game that obviously didn’t quite turn out according to plan.
