The one movie that made Jack Nicholson feel irrelevant: “My days are numbered”
After first clawing his way to stardom in the early 1970s, Jack Nicholson didn’t have to concern himself with irrelevancy for the next 40 years, and it’s not like he retired from acting because the roles had dried up.
The three-time Academy Award-winning icon remained as in-demand as ever in the twilight years of his career, and based on his performances in late-stage films like About Schmidt, The Departed, and The Bucket List, it wasn’t as if he’d lost a step as a performer, either.
Nicholson quietly bowed out with his head held high and his reputation secure as one of American cinema’s all-time greats, which he managed in spite of an unexpected existential crisis in the late 1980s. Audience tastes are constantly changing, but the success of one film, in particular, left the legend scratching his head and wondering if a shift was coming that would render him obsolete.
Of course, that didn’t happen when he continued delivering knockout turns for the next decade and a half, winning his third Oscar for As Good As It Gets along the way, but it just goes to show that even the best in the business have those moments where they start to think that maybe their time spent hovering around Hollywood’s upper echelons is drawing to a close.
Was it a transformative masterpiece that shook Nicholson to his foundations? Was it a pioneering work of celluloid that shifted the entire landscape of the medium? Was it an awards season sensation heralded as a picture destined to stand the test of time as an influential touchstone that shaped the future of the moving image? Nope, it was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
“Well, that movie made me feel totally irrelevant to anything that any audience could want and 119 years old,” he admitted to The New York Times in the aftermath of John Hughes’ comedy favourite seizing the zeitgeist in the summer of 1986. “Believe me, everyone else watching it liked it. And you know, I literally walked out of there thinking my days are numbered. These people are trying to kill me.”
It’s not unusual for an actor entering their veteran stage to start developing concerns that their star is losing some of its shine, but Ferris Bueller? Sure, it was a box office bonanza that captured the essence of teenage escapism and wish-fulfilment in mid-1980s America, but he was still Jack Nicholson.
He was less than a year away from turning 50 when Matthew Broderick ducked out of school and embarked on his adventure, so maybe there was an element of the midlife crisis at play, too. Of course, Nicholson was a big enough name and a talented enough thespian to weather multiple storms throughout his professional life, and Ferris Bueller hardly signalled the beginning of the end for his career.
