The one type of movie Michael Douglas will always regret never appearing in: “They just weren’t in vogue”
While being the son of an actor as famous as Kirk Douglas certainly opened the door up to give him many opportunities, Michael Douglas has worked very hard to define his own legacy.
There’s a healthy debate within the entertainment industry on whether ‘nepo babies’ have the benefit of unfair advantages, based on the fame of their parents, and while it’s generally true that they have a leg up on their competition, it doesn’t always mean that they’re untalented and undeserving, and the younger Douglas is a great example that proves this exception.
What allowed him to avoid being endlessly compared to his father was his willingness to try a little bit of every drama. Although he earned his breakout role as a seasoned cameraman in the controversial political thriller The China Syndrome (which he also produced), Douglas attained stardom thanks to his varied performances in the adventure romance Romancing the Stone, the musical drama A Chorus Line, the brutal action thriller Black Rain, and Oliver Stone’s financial satire Wall Street, which earned him the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
The actor’s career would move on to even bigger and better places as he became a box office king; after a second wave of popularity in the 1990s with thrillers like The Game and Basic Instinct, he would later introduce himself to an audience of younger viewers when he signed on to play Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, being at the top of the call sheet doesn’t mean that he has always had his pick of roles, as he told the AV Club that he missed out on the opportunity to be a gunslinger or cowboy.
“I would’ve loved to have done a western somewhere along the line,” Douglas lamented, “They just weren’t in vogue for most of my career”.
It’s a correct assertion as westerns went through a rather notorious retirement period right around the time that he had broken into the industry, and although there was a wave of spaghetti westerns that emerged in the 1960s and a few revisionist ones that earned cult fame in the ‘70s, the genre was pretty much non-existent for anyone other than Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner for the next few decades.
Douglas’ absence from the Wild West is more notable when compared to the career of his father, Kirk, who has appeared in many classics of the genre, including Along the Great Divide, The Indian Fighter, The Way West, and The Last Sunset, just to name a few. Memorably, he appeared in Gunfight at the OK Corral as Doc Holliday, a historical figure who would be portrayed by Val Kilmer in Tombstone, and later by Dennis Quaid in Wyatt Earp.
Although it’s possible that Douglas subconsciously avoided trying to contend with his father’s legacy, it’s also true that he rarely appeared in films set within the past, as he told the AV Club that he was “going to have to find out from somebody why” westerns weren’t offered to him, musing, “I guess I’m a current-events guy, I’m a non-fiction reader, and I guess I like to deal in the here and now, and deal with whatever issues, psychological or otherwise, affect modern man.”
Although Douglas is effectively retired, it would be a shame if Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was his last film, and perhaps, a truly great western script could lure him back to turn in another performance.
