Jack Nicholson’s bizarre obsession with bringing sex toys to set: “Don’t you fucking cut this thing out”
The line between genius and madness can often be blurred, and Jack Nicholson was the embodiment of an era where the most talented actors in the business had a habit of causing chaos both on and off set.
The emergence of ‘New Hollywood’ marked a major shift in the industry, with a fresh batch of actors and filmmakers taking cinema by storm. They were responsible for pushing boundaries, shattering barriers, and breaking big-screen taboos, and they also knew how to enjoy themselves away from the cameras.
With three Academy Award wins from 12 nominations and a back catalogue of remarkable performances spanning decades, Nicholson is unquestionably one of the all-time greats. At the same time, he doubled as one of Tinseltown’s pre-eminent hellraisers, embracing the excesses of the time period and revelling in a hedonistic concoction of sex, drugs, and alcohol.
It makes a lot of sense that Nicholson would regularly showcase his eccentric side with Marlon Brando, his ultimate hero and inspiration, who later became a close friend and neighbour. The seminal method man was an unusual guy, and his protege developed some strange recurring habits of his own that he regularly brought to his work.
Prime among them was a repeated insistence on weaponising dildos for improvisational purposes, which is every bit as odd as it sounds. Nicholson famously whipped out a sex toy to surprise Matt Damon when they were shooting Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, but his obsession with a surreptitious rubber phallus dates back a lot longer than the 2006 crime thriller.
While making The Postman Always Rings Twice with Bob Rafelson, Nicholson decided that his character should have an erection. Why? It’s better not to ask. “I get me a dildo, made all the preparations, and we get to the scene, he thought I was kidding,” the actor told Peter Bogdanovich. Obviously, he was not.
More than a decade later, and working with the same director on Man Trouble no less, Nicholson once again sought to indulge his unusual on-set pastime when he was about to shoot a sex scene with Ellen Barkin: “I’ve got my dildo this time, various sizes, and I say to Bob, ‘Now we’re gonna do this.'”
“And he said, ‘All right, goddamnit, you’ve been driving me nuts, we’ll do the shot,'” Nicholson continued. “And we do it, ‘Now don’t you fucking cut this thing out. I’ll kill everyone involved’. He leaves it in.” Threatening to murder an entire cast and crew if his fabricated boner didn’t make it into the final cut seems excessive, but clearly, it’s best not to get between Nicholson and his dildos.
After laying down an ultimatum that bodily harm would be inflicted upon everyone working on Man Trouble if the shot was removed, what did he have to show for it in the end? “Not one person saw it. Not one. I was stunned,” Nicholson lamented. “I was surprised that nobody noticed the fucking thing.”
Three movies, three different decades, and one recurring theme: for whatever reason, the icon’s creative juices can easily be stirred by a dildo.
