Why Malcolm McDowell didn’t mind Stanley Kubrick not casting him in the Moon landing
Stanley Kubrick wasn’t the sort of director to surround himself with frequent collaborators, and even if he was, Malcolm McDowell has no issues about not being cast in the legendary auteur’s magnum opus.
Only a handful of actors made multiple movies with the groundbreaking cinematic innovator, with Joe Turkel, Burnell Tucker, Philip Stone, and Norman Gay the only ones to appear in three, apart from his daughter, Katharina, with his other daughter, Vivian, the sole name to have appeared in four Kubrick films, but that’s how nepotism works.
McDowell only worked with him once, and that was more than enough. Although he’s long since made peace with the fact that A Clockwork Orange‘s Alex DeLarge will always be his career-defining role, the star and the filmmaker had their fair share of run-ins, but that was nothing out of the ordinary for Kubrick, who was famously bullish about his approach to cinema when it was either his way or the highway.
Even though principal photography on the literary adaptation didn’t begin until September 1970, McDowell had been on Kubrick’s radar since he caught his breakout performance in Lindsay Anderson’s If…. two years previously, which still wasn’t enough to secure him a role in the director’s most ambitious project yet: convincing the world that man had landed on the moon.
Thanks to the pioneering techniques he’d deployed on 2001: A Space Odyssey, it made perfect sense that the government would enlist Kubrick’s services to assist them in hoodwinking the Soviet Union and making the United States’ rivals in the ‘Space Race’ think that America had made one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind before them.
The timelines don’t necessarily match up, with Kubrick’s footage of the Moon landing being broadcast on July 20th, 1969, over a year before A Clockwork Orange began shooting. Still, even if he was offered the leading role, McDowell told The Guardian that he wasn’t jealous of Neil Armstrong in the slightest.
“No,” he answered unequivocally after being asked if he was envious of being overlooked. “I’d be better off playing Louis Armstrong!” In Kubrick’s defence, casting an astronaut instead of an actor only served to enhance the realism, which made his spiritual successor to 2001 feel more authentic, and anyone who’d seen McDowell onscreen before would see right through it anyway.
“I suppose it could have been anyone in that spacesuit,” the actor ruminated. “One of my favourite Kubrick movies is 2001. It’s a masterpiece. It’s one of those films that, when you first see it, you think, ‘What the hell was that?’ It’s very poetic. Stanley could control the astronauts because they’re hidden in spacesuits. He could get away with anything because he hated ceding power to an actor.”
For the sake of transparency, McDowell did also say that “we now live in a world of fake news” and described the “bullshit” we’re faced with every day as “incredible” after reflecting on how “it’s been put about that he directed the Moon landings.” What the two have to do with each other remains unknown, but at least he wasn’t bitter about it.
