The one role that forced Jack Nicholson out of his comfort zone: “They hired me to kick this movie in the ass”
By the mid-2000s, Jack Nicholson had reached the twilight of his career. The notoriously picky actor had become even more selective about the roles he decided to take on and for a good reason. After all, he was a bonafide Hollywood legend who didn’t need to work if he didn’t want to.
Between 2001 and 2003, he starred in four films – The Pledge, About Schmidt, Anger Management, and Something’s Gotta Give – but then he didn’t commit to another film for three years. When he did finally sign up for his next project, though, he did it because it forced him out of his comfort zone and made him approach his character in a much different way than he was used to.
In 2004, legendary director Martin Scorsese was announced to be remaking the 2002 Hong Kong action thriller Infernal Affairs. He loved the script written by William Monahan, which transposed the story of two undercover agents – one a cop infiltrating the Triads, one a Triad member infiltrating the police – to the Boston criminal underworld. Scorsese initially wanted Al Pacino to play notorious gangster Frank Costello in the film, but when that didn’t work out, he thought about another actor he’d known for decades but never worked with.
“Jack and I have known each other for 30 years,” said Scorsese in 2006. “For some reason, we had never quite connected on a movie, so I thought it would be interesting to see if he had any desire to take on the role of Costello.” A lengthy wooing process ensued, with Scorsese eventually convincing the reluctant actor that the movie would be more than a standard gangster picture. In fact, he essentially told Nicholson that he could do whatever he wanted with the character and that they were counting on his particular fairy dust to boost the movie in the eyes of the public. This may have appealed to Nicholson’s ego somehow, but it also gave him pause.
You see, he claimed to have never agreed to take on a part with the express intention of his presence turning it into a hit. In 2007, Nicholson told Cinema, “They hired me to kick this movie in the ass, knock it sideways and put it into the realm of the possibly popular. Well, this is something an actor can’t think about. I mean, you can’t say, ‘I’m going to make a hit movie.’ You’re as dead as you could be.”
Instead of letting this thought put him off signing up for the movie, now known as The Departed, Nicholson embraced leaving his comfort zone. He had become intrigued by the possibilities of the villainous role, and that “forbidden thought” wouldn’t leave his mind. He mused, “So, I just went with it. So, that’s different. I wouldn’t have approached it that way; in fact, just the opposite. I would be doing everything to block that thought out, but now I just let it in.”
Ultimately, Nicholson believed his career had moved into unusual territory by that point, and The Departed would be an interesting test case for his theory. His acting style and characters had become so well-known to audiences across four decades in the movies that it had become incumbent on him to “un-Jack” any part he played. He mused, “That’s when you’re in the pro game: when you can suspend who they think you are and re-involve them in a new story.”
Now, did Nicholson successfully “un-Jack” himself when he played the vicious, unpredictable, evil Frank Costello in The Departed? Not really. But did he grab the part by the scruff of the neck and wring every last ounce of weird, wonderful, lunatic brilliance out of it? Yes. Yes, he did.
In fact, producer Graham King marvelled, “Jack took the character of Costello to another level, as only he could do. There are so many of what I call ‘Jack moments’ in the film, which are just terrific.” In truth, it’s no wonder co-star Leonardo DiCaprio said, “Jack Nicholson is a force of nature.”
