“Without a star”: The movie Jack Nicholson quit because of a dodgy wig
I definitely think Jared Leto would abandon a film over a costume detail, dodgy or otherwise, though it seems more likely that he’d just spend the whole production torturing his co-stars and the cast and crew to make his point. Jason Statham might also bow out of a project over a wig, but he’d clearly be in the right.
It’s surprising, then, that of all people, Jack Nicholson was the person driven to resignation by a hairpiece. Throughout the decades, the Oscar winner has shown a willingness to be all types of crazy on screen and has never once shown any interest in his appearance; at least, that’s the conclusion you’d draw from watching most of his films, even when he’s meant to be extremely charming.
There have been times when, if I were Nicholson, I would have liked to quibble over hair. Namely, his turn as Jack Torrence in The Shining, when his shaggy comb-over makes him look like a cross between Mary Lou Retton and Pennywise the Clown, but before he drove an axe through a bathroom door in Kubrick’s bone-chilling masterpiece, he was clearly feeling a little bit precious about his locks.
It was the 1970s, and somewhere in Hollywood, screenwriter William Goldman had written a script about a magician who cannot control his ventriloquist’s dummy in the form of Magic, which was set to be directed by Norman Jewison, and he wanted Nicholson to star. It made sense for the character in the film isn’t simply preyed upon by his inanimate alter-ego, but he suffers from severe mental illness, which manifests itself through the dummy.
Nicholson was an obvious choice for playing someone with a split personality, especially when the film itself took things into the realm of horror rather than clinical psychology, but things fell apart when he learned that his character needed a hairpiece. The details of this negotiation are lost to time, unfortunately, but it must have devolved pretty spectacularly because not only did the actor pull the plug, Jewison exited the production around the same time, leaving the producers in the lurch.
Dennis Alwood, who served as the consultant ventriloquist on the film, remembered, “There we were, without a director and without a star”.
Al Pacino, Gene Wilder, and Chevy Chase were all considered as replacements for the central role, but when Richard Attenborough was brought in to replace Jewison, he suggested Anthony Hopkins, whom he had recently directed in A Bridge Too Far, if the Welsh actor could develop an American accent and lose some weight.
Interestingly, both Nicholson and Hopkins went on to create two of the most iconic horror villains in cinema history, Jack Torrence and Hannibal Lecter, and while it’s easy to see why the forner, who had been consistently unhinged for more than a decade, would earn the role, it’s harder to imagine how Hopkins would have been offered the latter role if it hadn’t been for his remarkable turn as Corky Withers in Magic.
The film earned a few rave reviews and induced an untold number of nightmares on its way to box office success; even though it’s nowhere near as fondly thought of as The Shining or The Silence of the Lambs, it deserves more love than it’s gotten. Ultimately, it’s Hopkins’ performance that stands the test of time, and it’s hard to argue that Nicholson could have done any better. There is a coldness in Hopkins’ characterisation that the Shining actor almost certainly couldn’t have achieved, and we have a hairpiece to thank for its existence.
