The mystery actor Stanley Kubrick fired after just two days on set: “It’s such a funny story”
Playing any role in a Stanley Kubrick movie isn’t an easy task, with the filmmaker’s notoriously exacting standards having caused issues for countless collaborators over the course of a long and legendary career.
Even the permanently positive Tom Cruise was pushed to his limits, having to do dozens upon dozens of takes in Eyes Wide Shut, even when it came to the most outwardly trivial of scenes. Harvey Keitel didn’t last, either, with the star being given his marching orders when Kubrick determined he wasn’t up to the task.
Shelley Duvall got it tougher than most when she was placed under immense pressure to deliver in The Shining, and while it reaped the rewards when her performance became one of the most iconic in horror history, being driven to the brink so often for so long is going to take its toll on anyone.
Sometimes, though, Kubrick would simply decide the person he’d hired for a role wasn’t good enough and would subsequently relieve them of their duties. Tim Blake Nelson may never have gotten the chance to work with the 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon maestro, but he knows somebody who has. For a while, at least.
“I won’t say the actor’s name because I don’t want to embarrass him/her, but it’s such a funny story,” he said on the Inside of You podcast. “And he/she was playing a nice role, and did a couple of days and Stanley Kubrick came and knocked on his/her door and took him/her down the hall and put him/her in front of a monitor and said, ‘I want to show you your scenes’, and showed the scenes.”
If Nelson is making a point of obscuring the performer’s identity, then it stands to reason he’s not talking about Keitel because his indignation at being disrespected by Kubrick is well-known. However, there are certain similarities to the shared dismissals, with Kubrick’s apathy being the common denominator.
As the Coen brothers collaborator explained, the director tried to let them down lightly, but the mystery thespian refused to buy it. “[He] showed his/her footage and then proceeded to say, ‘I’m going to let you go, it’s not working,'” Nelson offered. “And then he said, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’. And this person of course said, ‘Yeah, Stanley Kubrick. It’s not me, it’s Stanley Kubrick. Right.'”
Kubrick dipping into the big bag of cliches for one pulled straight out of the breakup manual seems unbecoming of a man who made it his mission to continually reinvent the possibilities of cinema, but he was presumably trying to let them down gently. Unfortunately, the short-lived Eyes Wide Shut cast member wasn’t buying it for a second, which is completely understandable.
