Why Jack Nicholson wanted to quit his Oscar-winning role in ‘As Good As It Gets’: “I was broiling”
One of only three men to win a trio of Academy Awards for acting and the most-nominated male performer in Oscars history, Jack Nicholson shouldn’t have been somebody who doubted whether or not they were up to the task of playing a particular part.
Since first breaking out and establishing himself as one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s leading lights, Nicholson continued solidifying himself as not only a generational talent but one of the all-time greats. In fact, that status was already inarguable by the end of the 1970s.
Nicholson went on a tear following his star-making turn in the counterculture classic Easy Rider. Between 1970 and 1980, he headlined Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Chinatown, The Passenger, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Shining, among others, a run that landed him four Oscar nods, one win, two Baftas, and a pair of Golden Globes.
Even as he segued into more age-appropriate parts, the adulation kept on coming: they used to say that the juiciest characters tended to dry up when an actor entered their 50s, but Nicholson’s work in Tim Burton’s Batman, A Few Good Men, The Pledge, About Schmidt, and The Departed laughed in the face of that notion and kept him at the forefront of the awards season conversation well into his late 60s.
However, Nicholson would have never been able to emulate Walter Brennan and become the second man to win three acting Oscars if he’d decided to walk away from the film that entered him into that rarefied air. The star had a solid working relationship with James L Brooks and scooped his second Oscar under his direction in Terms of Endearment, which is why he was so honest with the filmmaker in voicing his concerns that maybe he wasn’t the right guy for As Good As It Gets‘ Melvin Udall.
“I have a close relationship with Jim as a friend and as a worker. I adore him,” Nicholson told Rolling Stone. “But we were having such awful difficulty early on. And, you know, I’m at a stage where I don’t know what the hell I’m really doing half the time. And I just thought, ‘Jeez, we’re having such trouble’. I quietly said, ‘Look, Jim, if you feel like you’ve got to replace me, don’t worry about it.'”
As for Brooks’ response? “He laughed,” Nicholson revealed. “He thought I was crazy. He was having the time of his life as I was broiling.” The actor struggled to get a handle on the character to such an extent that he went right to the top and told the director there wouldn’t be any bad blood were he to be fired in favour of someone else.
Obviously, that didn’t happen, and Nicholson’s concerns were completely unfounded when he was named ‘Best Actor’ at the Oscars for his troubles.
