Michael Jackson’s bizarre desperation to be cast as James Bond: “You won’t be credible”
Like most things in his life, the relationship between Michael Jackson and the movie business was a strange one. He had a lifelong love of cinema and worked with some of the highest-profile auteurs in the industry, but his acting ambitions could best be described as fanciful.
He considered buying Marvel twice over to grant him his wish to play Spider-Man or X-Men figurehead Charles Xavier, which would have been a very expensive show of self-indulgence. Jackson even wrote an entire soundtrack for a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake, but Warner Bros wouldn’t cast him in the lead role.
The ‘King of Pop’ also wanted to bring Jar Jar Binks to life in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and discussed the idea of playing Peter Pan in Hook with Steven Spielberg, none of which came to pass. In a way, Jackson expressing his desire to be the next James Bond did make sense, if only for the fact it didn’t have a chance of happening.
As a musician and pioneering purveyor of top-tier music videos, Jackson rubbed shoulders with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, David Fincher, David Lynch, John Landis, John Singleton, Marlon Brando, Stephen King, Spike Lee, and Eddie Murphy, so he had plenty of Hollywood connections.
And yet, thanks to the hangers-on that developed a habit of refusing to reign in his excesses, his former agent Michael Ovitz didn’t tell Jackson he was being ridiculous when he said he wanted to inherit the mantle of 007, even if the conversation unfolded with his hat being covered in guacamole to make things even more ridiculous than they already were.
“I found him and explained for 15 minutes that we hadn’t been laughing at him,” Ovitz wrote in his memoirs of trying to calm Jackson down after the guacamole incident. “Finally, Michael’s face cleared. ‘OK, Ovitz. OK’, he said. ‘But I want to play James Bond’. I am proud to report I didn’t laugh this time.”
The idea of Jackson throwing on the tux and playing cinema’s most famous – and very British – secret agent is ludicrous, but Ovitz didn’t want to tell him. Instead, ego-massaging attempts saw the agent inform the singer that he was “thinly built, you’re too sensitive, you won’t be credible as a brutal block of stone.”
Ovitz even told Jackson straight-faced, “You’d be great at it, of course, but it’d be bad for you.” That technically wasn’t incorrect, but in terms of the bigger picture, it would be bad for everyone. Jackson playing James Bond is the sort of thing so far-fetched Mike Myers wouldn’t consider it for an Austin Powers movie, but he genuinely had a desperate urge to be 007 for reasons that only made sense to him.
