“He is so out there”: the 2003 performance Jack Nicholson called “the most interesting I’ve ever seen”
Few actors have a better handle on what great acting looks like than Jack Nicholson, the one-of-a-kind performer who set new standards in American cinema when cementing himself as one of the best ever.
He’s literally miles ahead of the competition: Nicholson is the most-nominated male actor in Academy Awards history with 12, Laurence Olivier is the only other to have reached double figures, with Denzel Washington and Al Pacino the only men alive with nine nods to their names.
The three-time winner is also one of only eight performers with a trio of victorious performances, and one of the major differences between himself and the other seven, no offence intended to Meryl Streep, Sean Penn, Daniel Day-Lewis, and the rest, is that he was also a fucking gigantic, bankable movie star.
That’s what made Nicholson such an era-defining force: he could act circles around most of his peers, but he was also as close to a guarantee as you’d find at putting arses in seats, too. Actors and movie stars can often be two completely different things, but in his case, both of them were made to look equally effortless.
With that in mind, if the ‘New Hollywood’ icon and retiree called a performance one of the most fascinating things he’d ever witnessed on the silver screen, then who’d disagree? There aren’t many folks in the business, past or present, better qualified to judge, even if the Oscars disagreed with him.
In 2004, Nicholson was asked which of the 21st century’s stars impressed him the most. He name-dropped Penn, and not only because they’ve been buddies for a long time, in addition to Keanu Reeves, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, and “the two Toms,” which would be Mr Cruise and Mr Hanks. However, he reserved special praise for Benicio del Toro.
“I love Benicio,” the legendary hell-raiser proclaimed. “I made Sean keep so much of Benicio’s scenes in The Pledge because I was just so crazy about what he was doing. I fought for every frame of it. I kept thinking, ‘Oh man, he is so out there, it’s unbelievable’. He’s with Sean in 21 Grams, and I would say that Benicio’s performance is the most interesting performance of a religious character that I’ve ever seen.”
In Alejandro G Iñárritu’s awards-botherer, del Toro plays Jack Jordan, an ex-con trying to use religion as a means to combat his addiction issues, only for his faith to be put to the test when he becomes responsible for the inciting car crash that serves as the centrepiece of the narrative. It’s an incredible turn, no doubt, but not Oscar-worthy, apparently.
He was shortlisted for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, but del Toro came up empty-handed, with Tim Robbins claiming the gold for Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. Fast forward 20 years, though, and there’s one performance that holds up significantly better than the other, and it’s not the one that won the Oscar.
