The 2014 movie that turned down Jack Nicholson’s comeback: “We had two meetings”
Technically, since he’s never officially announced that he’s retired from acting, you could make the argument that Jack Nicholson is merely on an extended sabbatical, albeit one that looks as though it’s never going to end.
When his peers stepped away from the industry, such as Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, and Sean Connery, they confirmed that their performative days were over. Nicholson hasn’t done that, so there’ll always be the faintest glimmer of hope that his self-imposed exile may not be a permanent thing.
James L Brooks seems confident that Nicholson will be back eventually, but don’t bet on it. After all, his last feature was released in 2010, and the three-time Academy Award-winning legend has barely been spotted in public since then, so it seems unlikely that he’ll commit to anything, even a quick cameo.
He’s had his opportunities: Tom Cruise was desperate to reunite with his A Few Good Men co-star on the action comedy El Presidente, which never happened, and he even signed on to headline the English-language remake of Toni Erdmann, but that one never happened, either, and you’d imagine that he’s turned down a fair few offers in that time, too.
One filmmaker had the perfect opportunity to coax Nicholson back to the screen, but in the end, they didn’t want to compromise their creative vision to the extent the living legend wanted. Having also developed the story David Dobkin was heavily invested in The Judge, as was its producer and leading man, Robert Downey Jr.
“We had two meetings with him,” the filmmaker explained. “He wanted the script rewritten much more than we did, which was a concern. So we went back, Robert and I, and we sat with him again. Then we just had to realise we just felt like defending the material. We were concerned with where we would had to have gone to get Jack happy.”
A combination of courtroom thriller and family drama, it’s not a stretch to imagine Nicholson as Joseph Palmer, the celebrated veteran magistrate in small-town Indiana who becomes the suspect in a fatal hit-and-run, with Downey Jr’s prodigal son and lawyer seeking to repair their estranged relationship and defending him in court, although it’s unclear how sweeping his requested script alterations were.
Enough to convince Dobkin and Downey that they didn’t want to bend to his whims, clearly. “They were really fun conversations,” the former acknowledged. “Jack is a hell of a storyteller. It was a different movie. It wasn’t right or wrong notes; it was a little bit different. A little more isolated. A little smaller.”
With that, Nicholson was out of the picture, and their next port of call was another one of the industry’s most decorated veterans: Robert Duvall, who notched an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. Would Nicholson have been in the awards conversation had he played the part? Almost certainly, and he’d have probably won, because he’s Jack Nicholson.
