The “opaque” movie that took Jack Nicholson by surprise: “I let the limitations keep me happy”
Throughout his personal exploits and professional career, Jack Nicholson has seen all that life has to offer. Having played a wide variety of characters in some of the most acclaimed movies of all time and living one hell of a life as one of Hollywood’s biggest-ever stars, Nicholson has truly experienced it all.
Having won three Academy Awards for his efforts in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, As Good as It Gets and Terms of Endearment, as well as giving further acclaimed performances in the likes of Easy Rider, Chinatown and A Few Good Men, Nicholson’s career is matched by the part of his life spent in the fast lane, living it to the max at all times.
Still, even the actors who seem to have experienced everything can occasionally be taken by surprise by one of their roles, and Nicholson once admitted that situation happened in the mid-1980s. The decade began with Nicholson’s brilliant turn as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and it ended with his memorable version of The Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman.
Sandwiched in between those two movies, along with a handful of others, was 1985’s Prizzi’s Honor, directed by John Huston, starring Nicholson and Kathleen Turner as highly skilled assassins who are hired to kill one another after they have fallen in love. The film was based on Richard Condon’s novel of the same name, who also co-wrote the script with Janet Roach.
In a 1985 interview with Film Comment, Nicholson spoke of his impression of Prizzi’s Honor and explained how he had been surprised by how Huston had handled the production and story. “Having come in so dumb, I was worried,” Nicholson admitted. “What John said that finally brought me around was ‘I always hesitate to say this, Jack, but I think we have a chance here to do something different.’”
Nicholson couldn’t help but be excited by the opportunity to add another string to his bow, especially when he had always viewed himself as an actor who was willing to take on difficult or alternative roles, something that has been proven to be true time and time again. “After you’ve made a movie or two, and you’re over the feeling that you’re hanging onto something ephemeral by your fingernails, the fun of doing it is in the difference of it,” the actor had noted.
He added, “From way too early on, I thought I knew everything, so the opaqueness of Prizzi’s Honor took me by surprise.”
However, the surprise of the film was not necessarily something that led to Nicholson being unable to play his character as he would have wished. In fact, he said that he “used” the surprise and “put my not understanding the material together with the character’s dumbness into a kind of dynamic on how to play him. I let the character’s limitations keep me happy.”
What Nicholson did was not ask which period the film was set in and just allow the character to arrive naturally under the director of Huston. The result was astounding, and Prizzi’s Honor received eight Academy Award nominations, including a ‘Best Actor’ nod for Nicholson and Huston’s daughter, Anjelica Huston, winning ‘Best Supporting Actress’. So it was the surprising opaqueness of the film that largely contributed to its success, at least in the eyes of its star, Jack Nicholson.
