“A fascist asshole”: Why Paul Newman hated working with Otto Preminger
Throughout his career, Paul Newman had a reputation for being one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, and he’d very rarely be caught speaking out of turn about any of the co-stars or filmmakers he worked with.
There are always exceptions to these rules, though, and Newman was no different. His most famous nemesis was fellow superstar Steve McQueen: the two never saw eye to eye and ended up becoming embroiled in one of the pettiest feuds in cinema history when they battled for supremacy both onscreen and off in the disaster classic The Towering Inferno.
Newman didn’t have the greatest of times working with Orson Welles either, but he was hardly the only performer to have issues collaborating with the enigmatic mastermind behind Citizen Kane. If anything, his biggest issues with the industry had nothing to do with the work: it was all about perception.
As great an actor as he was, and as regularly as he competed for Academy Awards, Newman bristled at any suggestions that he was all style and no substance. He was undoubtedly a handsome fella with a pair of Tinseltown’s most iconic peepers, and having his good looks weaponised against him was always a major point of contention.
However, a combination of a picture he didn’t want to make and a director who ruled their set with an iron fist unsurprisingly didn’t combine to create a memorable experience. “I didn’t want to do Exodus,” he told Rolling Stone. “I thought it was too cold and expository, and actually, I tried to get out of it.”
The 1960 historical epic was an important moment, with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo being credited for his work despite his blacklisting from the business, even if Exodus doesn’t get mentioned as often in that regard as Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. In a fascinating coincidence, that movie starred Kirk Douglas, who worked with Exodus director Otto Preminger several years later on In Harm’s Way and compared him to a Nazi.
It might seem like a harsh comparison to make, but when pressed for his own thoughts on the auteur, Newman’s assessment wasn’t exactly markedly different. “He’s got a reputation of being such a fascist asshole, and he is on the set,” he offered. “I mean, he can pick out the most vulnerable person and then walk all over him. He could walk down a line of 200 people at a fast pace and pick somebody out and make lunch out of him.”
Newman’s response to Preminger’s overbearing methods was to fake his own death during a stunt sequence, obviously, which left the director shaken. There might have been tension between the two when the cameras were rolling, but it almost completely thawed afterwards, though, with the Exodus leading man describing him as “articulate, informed, funny, and absolutely loveable.”
