The one thing Jack Nicholson swore he would “do everything I can to avoid” in his career
Once Easy Rider earned him a first Academy Award nomination and made him a star, there was no looking back for Jack Nicholson. While stardom can often be fleeting, he remained one of Hollywood’s most ubiquitous A-listers for the next four decades until quietly stepping away from the spotlight.
Audiences have become so accustomed to the industry’s biggest names holding onto the limelight for so long that it’s easy to forget how difficult it is to stay relevant for 40 years. It was arguably harder in Nicholson’s day, when franchise gigs and billion-dollar hits weren’t even a glint in Tinseltown’s eyes.
Instead, he did it through a combination of talent and sheer force of will. Nicholson knew he was good at his job, and he made a point of proving it repeatedly. With a record-setting volume of Oscar nods for a male actor, countless seminal performances, and his ironclad belief that he’s the most successful leading man in cinema history, he was never in any danger of falling from his lofty perch.
Which is just as well, otherwise he could have ended up doing the exact thing he swore he would never do. Until the turn of the millennium and the onset of television’s ongoing ‘Golden Age’, no self-respecting actor would be caught dead in a TV series unless they were completely out of options.
Heading to the small screen for a multi-season run on an episodic show was a sign of irrelevance, and Nicholson wanted no part of it, even as far back as the 1970s. However, he wasn’t bold or cocky enough to suggest that he’d be a superstar forever, even if he made it clear that television was the hurdle he was most unwilling to jump.
“I’m sure I’ll have to wind up making my living in that way,” he said after being asked if he ever saw himself heading up a TV show. “All old actors do. I mean, you have to go on making a living. Do you know any completely retired film stars? Cary Grant’s maybe the only one; he doesn’t have to do a television series. John Wayne probably never will either.”
In a sign of the times, Nicholson said it wasn’t “too usual” for an actor to have “a 25-year film career,” a statement that doesn’t hold much water in the modern age when Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for over a quarter of a century, never mind everything he made before, during, and after.
Still, the Five Easy Pieces and Chinatown frontman suggested that because most of his peers “have been broke at some time during it,” he couldn’t definitively rule himself out of a TV run. And yet, he made his point pretty unequivocally: “I mean, I will do everything I can to avoid doing a television series, you can bet on that.”
Of course, Nicholson was a man of his word. His final outing on the small screen came in 1967 when he guest-starred in a single episode of The Guns of Will Sonnett, and the only times he would appear on TV in the next six decades were when he made brief introductions on the 40th and 50th anniversary episodes of Saturday Night Live in 2015 and 2025, respectively.
