The one movie Steve McQueen knew he should have never made: “It was shit!”
An actor doesn’t get to influence the direction of their career until they become a star, which always leaves them at the mercy of making movies because they have to. Steve McQueen eventually controlled his own destiny, but there was one film he made along the way that he always wished he hadn’t.
Even though he was one of the biggest stars of the 1960s and 1970s, and remains an iconic figure to this day, the ‘King of Cool’ wasn’t an overnight sensation. He always had the raw tools to succeed in a cutthroat business, but he had to bide his time to wait for the breakthrough he was confident would come.
Playing the leading role on the TV series Wanted Dead or Alive between 1958 and 1961 helped get his name out there, but it was a lot more difficult for an actor to make the jump from television to film back then. Fortunately, The Magnificent Seven was released before the show reached its conclusion, which was the first proper indication that McQueen had been made for the big screen.
It was still his seventh feature, so he wasn’t a novice. However, he went from strength to strength for the rest of the decade, cementing himself on the A-list with The Great Escape, earning an Academy Award nomination for The Sand Pebbles, and doubling down on his status as Hollywood’s coolest cat with The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt.
By the time he engaged in a petty game of one-upmanship with Paul Newman on The Towering Inferno, he was the single highest-paid star in the business. And yet, one particular ghost from his past continued to haunt him. Or, to be more specific, one amorphous blob from his past continued to haunt him.
In his first time taking top billing, McQueen headlined the cast of 1958’s The Blob, which became a box office hit and one of the most influential sci-fi flicks of its era. It was a bog-standard tale of a gelatinous extra-terrestrial creature that wreaks havoc on small town America, and as popular as it was, the actor fucking hated it more than anything else he’d ever done, or would do.
When he first read the script, he had a bad feeling about it. “It was shit!” he informed Michael Munn. “But Neile [Adams, his wife at the time] said, ‘Why not do it?’ I said, ‘It’ll kill my career’. I said, ‘No, it won’t. No one’ll see it. No one’ll know you were in it’. I figured she was right.” Unfortunately, she was not: “Man, everyone saw it,” he sighed.
Ironically, he could have at least drowned his sorrows with money after being offered 10% of the profits, but he turned it down. Since the B-movie made over $4 million in ticket sales on a budget of $110,000, he’d have made himself a pretty penny. Instead, since he thought it would flop, he settled for an upfront fee of $3,000.
By the end of his career, he hadn’t changed his tune. In one of his final interviews before his death in 1980, McQueen was asked about The Blob. His response? “I don’t want to talk about that movie.”
