“Very nice of him”: when Paul Newman personally recommended Michael Caine for ‘The Man Who Would Be King’
In the early 1970s, Paul Newman received a script from legendary Maltese Falcon director John Huston. It was a tale of two ex-British Army soldiers who search for adventure in the 1880s and find themselves in Kafiristan, where one of them is mistaken for a God and made the King of a local village. The script was based on a classic story by Rudyard Kipling, and Newman loved it. There was one problem, though – he didn’t think he was right for the lead role. Luckily, he had someone in mind who was perfect for it: Michael Caine.
Huston first read Kipling’s rip-roaring adventure when he was a child and had long dreamed of turning it into a motion picture. Indeed, he tried to set it up in the ’50s with the lead roles of Peachy Carnehan and Danny Dravot being played by Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Sadly, Bogart’s death in 1957 threw a significant spanner in the works, and when Gable followed suit in 1960, the project fell by the wayside. Huston tried to kickstart it again with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, but that also fell apart.
When Huston watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though, a fire was lit inside him again. He thought Newman and co-star Robert Redford would be perfect for Peachy and Dravot, so he sent the adaptation he’d written to Newman. As soon as Newman read it, he knew it was terrific, so he called Huston to tell him. To Huston’s chagrin, though, he felt he and Redford weren’t ideal to play the two British soldiers, even if they could get away with attempting accents. Instead, he felt Huston should hire British actors, so he suggested Michael Caine and Sean Connery.
In 2024, Caine told the As Luck Would Have It blog that he was aware of Newman’s kind gesture, and he always respected the iconic star for it. He smiled, “Apparently, it was Paul Newman who suggested me and Sean, which was very nice of him.”
Ultimately, The Man Who Would Be King was a special project for Caine, and to this day, he considers it his favourite film in his long, storied career. He loved the idea of playing a character originally intended for Bogart, his favourite actor as a child, and he relished working with Huston, whose loud, commanding voice he likened to the voice of God.
“What a man,” Caine exclaimed before giving some insight into Huston’s directing expertise. He revealed, “I remember he gave me a great piece of direction. There was one scene where I thought my character should speak very deliberately. John just raised his hand and said, ‘It’s OK, Michael, you can speak faster – he’s an honest man.'”
Caine also revealed that Huston had a blunt sense of humour and wasn’t a man to sugarcoat things. He laughed when he remembered a day when Connery, who was afraid of heights, was reticent to step on a rickety-looking rope bridge. Caine claimed Connery timidly asked, “Do you think the bridge looks safe?” Huston regarded him with a deadpan expression and said, “Sean, the bridge looks the way it always has. The only difference is that today, you’re going to be standing in the middle of it.”
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