“It’s extremely difficult”: Michael Caine discusses his most valuable acting lesson
Actors and alcohol have a relationship that spans centuries, but Michael Caine ended up landing himself in some hot water when he used the brush of inebriation to tar an entire generation of awards-laden and influential thespians.
In fairness, he wasn’t exactly a million miles wide of the mark when he passed comment on the rampant drinking culture that defined many of the United Kingdom’s heavyweights of stage and screen during the period he rose to prominence, and he was self-aware enough to include himself among that number.
Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Terence Stamp, Caine, and even Anthony Hopkins, before he went teetotal, were famed for their hard-drinking, hard-partying, and generally hellraising ways, but Richard Harris – who evidence shows was a huge part of that booze-soaked scene – was left indignant by Caine’s generalisation that the drink was a necessity.
After hearing of Caine’s indictment, Harris referred to the two-time Academy Award winner as an “over-fat, flatulent windbag” and “a master of inconsequence masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues”. The man born Maurice Micklewhite loved a bevvy without a doubt, but he learned at a very early stage in his career that being drunk in real life and playing a pissed-up character were two very different things.
Describing it as “a very valuable lesson to me as an actor,” Caine regaled NPR with his moment of realisation. “I was in repertory, and I had to come in drunk in this scene, and I came in drunk, and the producer said, ‘Just a minute. What are you doing?’. I said, ‘I’m drunk in this scene, sir’. He said, ‘I know you’re drunk in this scene, what are you doing?’. I said, ‘Well, sir, I’m playing a drunk’. He said, ‘No, you’re not’. He said, ‘You’re playing an actor trying to talk slurred and walk crooked.'”
From the producer’s perspective, an actual drunk is somebody “who is trying to walk straight and speak properly,” not an obvious caricature of what folks believe a drunkard to be. Caine admitted that “it’s very difficult to do” as a performer, but the advice that “you mustn’t see the acting” was something he immediately took to heart. From that moment on, slurring and stumbling was out the window as the star gained a new appreciation of how to portray a jelly-legged fellow, which was just one of many things he learned from that producer “which had never left me.”
Plenty of actors have played pissheads or lived it for real. However, Caine’s mentor was right in pointing out that whenever a performer is doing a blatantly exaggerated turn as a drunk person, it’s very easy to spot because the majority of viewers have been in the exact same situation at least a handful of times themselves.
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