When Michael Caine went eight years without blinking to become a better actor: “They thought I was a psychopath”
Some of cinema’s greatest-ever actors have adopted unusual tricks to aid their performances, but Michael Caine didn’t gain much more than quizzical looks and questions over his wellbeing when he went the better part of a decade trying not to let anybody see him blink.
Of course, the obvious question is why anybody would assume keeping one’s eyes open every time they’re on camera or out in public benefits the art of performance in any way. In his defence, Caine was at the beginning of his career and absorbing as much information and advice as possible, which meant he was more inclined to take things at face value.
Sometimes, though, it can be massively helpful for an actor to maintain the illusion and go through an entire movie without blinking. One of the most notable cases in point came when Robert Patrick trained himself to fire a gun without breaking his gaze in James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a high-octane action blockbuster rooted in sci-fi and fantasy.
Anthony Hopkins won an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ for keeping the chilling glare of Hannibal Lecter largely unbroken in The Silence of the Lambs, even if those two examples came long after Caine had decided that he was going to make it his mission never to be caught blinking, not even by his nearest and dearest.
Needless to say, the type of roles Caine played during his rise up the ranks, and even after he became an international star in the mid-1960s through to his evolution into one of the industry’s most respected elder statesmen and most venerated veterans, did not tick any similar boxes.
And yet, he decided to do it anyway, all because he’d once read in a book that blinking was the devil. Not only did he take it on board, he took it to the extreme. “One thing that stuck in my mind was, ‘Don’t blink. You must never blink,’” he told The Mirror. It may not have been intended as a literal instruction, but that didn’t matter to Caine.
“For the next eight years, I walked around trying not to blink,” he explained. “People around me, my mother and everybody thought I had gone nuts. They thought I was a psychopath. I used to frighten the life out of people.”
His dedication can’t be faulted, but it all seems a little unnecessary. Blinking is just something that people do, and if anything, it might have harmed Caine’s desire to refine his acting prowess when he’d inevitably be spending the majority of his time not only trying to deliver his lines to the best of his ability but keeping at least a small part of his subconscious trained on making sure he wasn’t blinking.
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