The 1997 movie that made Jack Nicholson “want to shrivel up and die”
It’s well-known that Jack Nicholson made a deliberate effort to lean into comedy in the final decade of his career, but there might have been another intentional career movie that went more under the radar.
The three-time Academy Award-winning legend admitted that 9/11 convinced him that heavyweight dramas were no longer in his best interests, and since he was a dab hand at lighter fare anyway, most of his final run of features were designed more for tickling the funny bone than punching audiences in the gut.
There were exceptions, but as much as Martin Scorsese’s The Departed was definitely not a light-hearted comedic romp, Nicholson was still frequently hilarious as Frank Costello, most of which came from his improvisations, only some of which were dildo-assisted, much to Matt Damon’s horror.
The second, and more overlooked, late-stage pivot was that, whether by accident or design, Nicholson tended to surround himself with names who, even if they weren’t necessarily as big or iconic as he was, and there haven’t been many in Hollywood history, they were at least as popular with audiences.
Anger Management partnered him with Adam Sandler, he teamed up with Diane Keaton and Keanu Reeves under Nora Ephron’s direction in Something’s Gotta Give, he sparred with Scorsese, Damon, and DiCaprio in The Departed, entered the cultural lexicon alongside Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List, and bowed out opposite Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, and Paul Rudd in How Do You Know.
It might have been coincidental, but then again, maybe not. After all, as far back as 1997, when he was promoting James L Brooks’ As Good As It Gets, Nicholson admitted that promoting a movie and having his co-stars do nothing but answer questions about working with a talent as bright, shining, and magnanimous as his was starting to get on his nerves so much that he considered calling it quits.
“They’re great at answering that question,” he deadpanned, referring to co-stars Greg Kinnear, Helen Hunt, and Cuba Gooding Jr. “It’s like I’m this statue, like Jesus. Every time they get asked about me, I want to just shrivel up and die. It would kill me, frankly, if I felt like I was starting to grow the moo of a sacred cow.”
Unfortunately, when you’re Jack Nicholson, the people you’ve worked with are going to be asked what it was like to work with Jack Nicholson. It’s an arena Meryl Streep also finds herself in, and it pissed Sharon Stone off, so why shouldn’t the Easy Rider and Cuckoo’s Nest firebrand feel the same way himself?
“I think that might be the one thing that might stop me from working,” he revealed, a little over a decade before he did stop working, which is precisely why you can draw the conclusion that he actively sought out colleagues on an even keel, just so the entire publicity tour wouldn’t revolve solely around him.
