The one thing Humphrey Bogart always loathed about acting: “I hate myself”
No matter your job, you probably find yourself doing something you’re not keen on doing at some point, whether that be giving a speech, carrying heavy boxes, or commuting on public transport at rush hour.
In an ideal world, it would be nice to just have unlimited free time to do whatever you want, whenever you want, but sadly, that’s not how life works. Still, if you’re lucky enough, you can get yourself a job that hardly feels like work – or at least it’ll give you enough perks to make the graft worth it.
Being a Hollywood star is certainly not an easy job in the slightest, but if anything, it comes with large pay cheques, the chance to travel the globe, wear nice outfits, get lots of free things, and everything else in between. That doesn’t mean that certain actors haven’t still found the time in their busy schedules to air their complaints, though, like Humphrey Bogart.
The actor was a true Hollywood icon, appearing in some proper classics, like the ultimate romance movie, Casablanca, and the unforgettable noir The Maltese Falcon. Despite the acclaim he garnered over the years, Bogart – who often played an effortlessly cool yet cynical anti-hero type – sometimes cursed himself for entering a profession that asked a lot of him.
This wasn’t because he had to spend hours rehearsing and tapping into the minds of characters separate from him, nor was it because of the pressures of fame and being in the limelight. Rather, he hated having to get up early.
Revealing his distaste for rising before the sun had even properly come up, Bogart told Photoplay in 1942, “I hate myself for choosing a profession that gets me up at dawn. I hate myself all the way to the studio and into the make-up room, ‘Boys Town,’ I call it. There we sit, the glamour boys waiting to be made beautiful and feeling like a snail’s grandmother.”
Clearly, the actor wasn’t interested in getting up super early only to have to sit in a chair and have people play about with his hair and make-up. He wanted to get up at a reasonable time, act without all the faff, and then go home.
“Frankly, I don’t like this work too much, so put me down on the wrong side of the ledger on that one,” he added. “This awful morning rising business kills me. Mayo [Methot; his then-wife] has to prop me up or I’d curl up after my tea and go to sleep. Come to think of it, that’s what I do. I should like my work more. So put that down as my own black mark against me”.
There are certainly worse things to have to wake up for that early, and at least Bogart could acknowledge that, at the end of the day, he chose to be an actor, so he couldn’t complain all that much. Luckily for us, he sucked up his dissatisfaction with rising at the crack of dawn and delivered some flawless performances across genres that allowed him to become one of the most well-respected icons of Hollywood’s golden era.
