The only movie that encouraged Michael Caine to be a bad actor: “I couldn’t turn that down”
Obviously, Michael Caine was a good actor. One of the greatest, in fact, but when you made as many movies as he did, there was bound to be at least a handful of turds in the bushel.
In addition to winning two Academy Awards from six nominations in four different decades, Caine was also a three-time Razzie nominee. While you can’t begrudge him making the shortlist for The Island and Jaws: The Revenge, his nod for Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill feels supremely undeserved.
The industry’s finest cockney export was always honest about his many misfires, not that anyone in their right mind would be willing to defend The Swarm anyway, but even though he made well over 100 pictures throughout an extraordinary career, the good still managed to comfortably outweigh the bad.
Did Caine give a few shoddy, substandard, or phoned-in performances in his time? Of course he did; almost every actor is guilty of that. However, he was too talented to let those minor blips knock him off his perch as one of the United Kingdom’s most iconic cross-continental stars.
If there’s one thing a thespian should never do, it’s be terrible on purpose. Bad actors can’t help themselves, since they’re rubbish to begin with, but a great actor sleepwalking through a part is an insult to the profession. On one occasion, though, Caine was instructed to be crap on purpose, and he nailed it.
In one of his many detours into independent cinema that barely anybody saw, Caine starred opposite Dylan Moran in the 2003 Irish caper, The Actors. The pair play jobbing, low-rent stage performers who try to turn their fortunes around by planning a con that would force a retired criminal to part with £50,000.
Caine and Moran’s characters are in the midst of a run of William Shakespeare’s Richard III, and since their characters couldn’t emote or deliver a monologue to save themselves, Caine followed suit. “I get to play the worst Richard III you’ve ever seen,” he beamed. “I couldn’t turn that down. It was a lot of fun. A lunatic film.”
In certain luvvie circles, butchering Shakespeare is tantamount to sacrilege and a sin that many wouldn’t dare commit. In Caine’s case, when he was offered the chance to be an intentionally shit Richard III, he couldn’t sign on the dotted line fast enough.
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