“I asked them to cut it”: the one movie line Michael Caine unsuccessfully wanted removed
Having been a star since the early 1960s and endured decades of industry upheaval to remain as in-demand as ever right up until his retirement at the age of 90, Michael Caine presumably had enough clout to throw his weight around on the odd occasion.
Of course, the affable everyman has never been that kind of person away from the cameras, which might explain why one of the rare times he made a demand fell on completely deaf ears. Caine had his own set of rules and regulations before he even boarded a project in the first place, but trying to muscle into the post-production suite was clearly a step too far.
Gaining first-hand experience of many terrible films during the slumps in his career that reduced him to being shat on by bees and pretending to be attacked by a shark, Caine decided that if he was going to avoid becoming a has-been, he needed to seize his future by the horns.
That’s precisely what he did, too. His second downward spiral in the mid-1990s culminated in the two-time Academy Award winner developing his own set of cardinal rules that would dictate his trajectory. As a result, he was free to lean into his legendary status and pick and choose the roles he wanted to play, which in turn established him as one of Hollywood’s favourite elder statesmen.
Taking that sentiment and running with it, director James Marsh’s 2018 heist caper King of Thieves used Caine as the focal point for gathering together an esteemed ensemble of veteran British thespians to retell the story of the infamous Hatton Garden robbery, where a crew of ageing criminals conspired to pull off a daring job that gained international headlines.
The police forbade Caine from meeting the real Brian Reader, but he still threw himself into the part with the requisite amount of gusto. Sparring with Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon, Ray Winstone, Tom Courtenay, Paul Whitehouse, and more, the bickering between the thieves led to one particularly heated exchange between Caine and Gambon, which saw the former drop a four-letter bomb he’s rarely – if ever – been caught using either personally or professionally.
Maybe it was a heat of the moment thing because when Caine discovered after King of Thieves had screened for audiences that his foul-mouthed tirade remained completely intact, he admitted he’d gone to the producers and requested its removal. “They left the ‘cunt’ in, then,” he sighed to The Guardian. “I asked them to cut it.”
Much to Caine’s dismay, the film does indeed feature a scene where he calls Gambon a cunt, even if he’d tried to prevent the air being turned blue by a word that isn’t typically associated with such a distinguished knight of the realm.
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