Why Malcolm McDowell fell out with Stanley Kubrick: “So ungenerous and so mean”
Cinema history is littered with actor-director partnerships that stand the test of time. However, befitting his reputation as a filmmaker who often came across as distant and unconcerned with sentimentality, Malcolm McDowell never worked with or even spoke to Stanley Kubrick again after A Clockwork Orange.
To be fair, Kubrick never had a reputation for enjoying the experience of working with a performer so much that he went out of his way to cast them in another role. In fact, Peter Sellers, Kirk Douglas, and Sterling Hayden have the rare distinction of being the director’s most prolific collaborators, and they all worked with him just twice and no more.
That wasn’t McDowell’s main bugbear with the career-defining part of Alex in the controversial and incendiary adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel, though. As tends to be the case whenever on-camera talents voice their displeasure with even their finest work, the star’s umbrage was derived entirely from his lack of monetary gain.
A Clockwork Orange may have given McDowell the springboard to everything that followed in its wake, but he doesn’t think he was paid fairly for his contributions. He may have only had a handful of credits under his belt before he played the lead in an acclaimed masterpiece from a top-tier director, but he still had an inkling of what he was worth.
As he explained to Entertainment Weekly, while the studio may have given him the deal he asked for in a roundabout way, Kubrick actively swindled him out of earning additional money after A Clockwork Orange had soared to over $100million at the box office. McDowell had been told he was entitled to a percentage of the profits, only for the filmmaker to deceive him.
“He was supposed to pass on 2.5% of the movie, which he never did,” he said. “When I was told this by the head people at Warner Bros when it was a huge hit, and they said, ‘Well, you’re going to be a very rich young man’. I said, ‘Really? Why’s that?’. They went, ‘Well, with the 2.5% we passed on to Stanley for you’. And I went, ‘Well, I never got it.'”
Warner Bros put it down to Kubrick being Kubrick, but McDowell was incensed. “Why would he do that?” he continued. “It’s so ungenerous and so mean when he’s had every fucking fibre of my being.” The actor was so enraged he never spoke to him ever again, referring to the 2.5% of the profits he’d been promised from A Clockwork Orange never materialising as Kubrick having “betrayed” him.
He was still paid $100,000 upfront for his troubles, which was hardly a tiny sum for a relatively unknown performer in a small-scale production in the early 1970s, but it could – and should – have been a whole lot more.
Watch the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange below.
