The movie Paul Newman didn’t think he was good enough to make: “The work I am doing is childish”
Every actor has at least one performance or one movie they’ll come to regret, although Paul Newman was at least fortunate enough to get his out of the way at the very first time of asking.
He made his feature debut in 1954’s historical drama The Silver Chalice, and he hated it. Plenty of performers will look back at their introduction to the world of cinema and cringe, whereas Newman opted to go several steps further in a move that ended up backfiring spectacularly.
When the period piece was gearing up for its premiere on television, by which time he was established as a mainstream star, Newman took out a newspaper advert urging people not to watch the film because it was so terrible. His intentions may have been admirable, but going public with his issues led to a surge in viewership as fans of his work sought to discover why he detested The Silver Chalice so much.
By the end of the following decade, Newman was a made man. He’d earned ‘Best Actor’ nominations from the Academy Awards for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, and Cool Hand Luke, and he’d end the 1960s by giving one of his most iconic turns and making a lifelong friend when he partnered up with Robert Redford for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
In between the iconic prison drama and the classic western, Newman tried his hand at directing. He didn’t play an on-camera role in 1968’s drama Rachel, Rachel, but he did cast his wife Joanne Woodward in the lead role. Earning a Golden Globe win for ‘Best Director’ and an Oscar nod for ‘Best Picture’, it would be fair to say his feature debut from the other side turned out pretty well.
However, straddling the line between acclaimed dramatic actor, A-list superstar, and box office draw came with its own set of pressures; the self-consciousness Newman felt about his acting career filtered into the production of Rachel, Rachel, placing him in the midst of a crisis of confidence.
“It has something to do with the way you feel when you wake up in the morning,” he mused of his self-doubts, per CBS. “One day, you say to yourself, ‘My work is impeccable. There’s nothing I can’t do.’ But, next morning, you think, ‘The work I am doing is childish. It is scaled to adulation and financial return, and that return is out of all proportion to my contribution. It’s silly, it’s stupid, it has nothing whatever to do with being an adult.”
Even though the pressure was off in one respect because he wasn’t part of the cast and thus wouldn’t be used as the focal point of the marketing, if Rachel, Rachel was a critical or commercial bust, Newman’s sideline as a director would be over before it began. Most first-time filmmakers experience something similar, but given his status, Newman felt it more than most debutants.
