Paul Newman’s unofficial sequel to his all-time favourite role: “His old tricks don’t work”
There aren’t many big-name actors who navigate an entire career at the Hollywood summit without a sequel or two, and while he wasn’t one of them, Paul Newman still envisioned one of his later films as an unofficial trilogy-capper to his all-time favourite role.
Since he never wanted to be a movie star, but became one because he happened to be handsome, charismatic, and incredibly good at his job, it’s not as if Newman was going franchise mad and reprising roles like a ‘New Hollywood’ version of Sylvester Stallone or Vin Diesel.
When he first played Eddie Felson in The Hustler, the end result was a 1960s classic and a ‘Best Actor’ nomination. When he brought the character back to the screen 25 years later in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, he went one better and finally ended his trophy drought by winning an Academy Award.
The only other time he played the same guy twice, it was because he pushed for it to happen. Newman loved playing Lew Harper so much in 1966’s mystery thriller, Harper, that when he agreed to topline another feature-length adaptation of author Ross Macdonald’s books, The Drowning Pool, he refitted it into a direct sequel, making it his first-ever follow-up.
Newman loved the role “because it will accommodate any kind of actor’s invention,” and any time he was due on set as Harper, he knew he was “going to have a lot of fun that day.” Technically, he also voiced Doc Hudson in Cars 3 and the short film Mater in the Ghostlight, but since he’d been dead for almost a decade by that point and didn’t have a say in the matter, it’s best not to count it as the third part he’d played more than once.
He never got the chance to have a third go-around as the private investigator, but Harper’s shadow nonetheless loomed over Robert Benton’s 1998 thriller, Twilight, the fourth-to-last live-action feature of the legendary star’s career. Once again, Newman played a private eye, and he’s once again drawn into a case that has spiralling and far-reaching implications, which wasn’t lost on him in the slightest.
“Harry [Ross] is Harper that has lost a couple of big ones,” he agreed, talking to The New York Times. “He has found out his old tricks don’t work. He’s more needy. Looking for a rest. He thinks he’s found it.” Of course, he hadn’t found it; instead, he got sucked into a twisting tale of murder plots, celebrities with secrets to hide, and the disappearance of a high-profile actor’s ex-husband.
Twilight is a sequel to Harper and The Drowning Pool in everything but name, something he was happy to admit, and it was the closest Newman came to getting a third bite at his most favoured performative apple. It wouldn’t have been too difficult for director Robert Benton and co-writer Richard Russo to embrace it as such, but despite the connections being surface-level, the leading man was self-aware enough to notice the similarities.
