The one performance Paul Newman wished he could do over: “I can’t look at my work”
One of the hardest parts of creating art, whether that be writing, painting, making music, or acting, is standing back and admiring the finished product without an overwhelming feeling of self-doubt. It’s hard to look at your own work objectively, and this is something that stops many people from even making art to begin with – the fear of being ‘bad’ can stop us from trying altogether, which is one of the greatest tragedies of the human experience.
Acting is an art form that leaves no room for self-consciousness. To put yourself in front of a camera for the whole world to see means opening yourself up to criticism, although we’re often our own worst critics – no one awaits our downfall like ourselves. Despite the fact that actors have to put themselves out there, insecurities and all, there are certain stars who simply choose not to watch their films to absolve themselves of intense self-criticism, like Johnny Depp and Reese Witherspoon.
Paul Newman, one of Hollywood’s most iconic stars, has mixed feelings about watching his own movies, and in one instance, he found the experience deeply off-putting. Being faced with a performance he wasn’t particularly proud of, Newman couldn’t help but wince.
Setting the scene in his book The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, Newman wrote, “I was riding my exercise bike this morning, just running the channels, and there was Hombre, a film I made with Marty Ritt, based on an Elmore Leonard novel, that attempted to depict anti-Indian racism in the Old West.”
Released in 1967, the movie also starred Fredric March and Diane Cilento, and it performed well with critics, even if Newman doesn’t seem to feel proud of it. “I watched about fifteen minutes on the TV—but I can’t look at my work in that picture without disparaging it,” he admitted. Even though Newman was a frequent collaborator of Ritt’s, also working with him on movies like The Long, Hot Summer and The Outrage, he didn’t think that Hombre was their finest film together.
Newman looked back at his performance with an incredibly critical eye, writing, “If I was playing that part now, I’d approach it differently. I think I’d make that immovable presence the core of the character, but not in such an obvious way. And I would desperately fight to wear brown contact lenses. The blue eyes just destroyed everything.”
The actor was known for his sparkling azure eyes, which sharply contrasted with his tanned skin, and it was these features that became his defining physical traits, although Newman clearly thought they distracted from his role in Hombre.
Still, critical reviews praising the performances of the cast, even if Newman’s role as an Apache-raised white man has caused slight controversy. However, when your job is to act, it surely becomes hard not to look at yourself with an extremely disparaging eye, ready to jump on every decision and come up with a ‘better’ or ‘different’ way that you could’ve executed your performance. In this case, it seems like Newman had second thoughts about the depiction of his character.
Hombre might not have been Newman’s best film, but it’s by no means the worst. For the actor, though, watching just 15 minutes of it while exercising was simply too much to handle.
