When Richard Harris made a student film about the word ‘c*nt’ in his 60s: “Who the fuck are you?”
It should go without saying that veteran actors, especially those lauded as among the best of their generation who’ve had incredibly successful careers on stage and screen for decades, don’t appear in student films. Richard Harris did, though, and he had an absolute blast.
Rarely has the old adage of ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’ been truer than an ambitious student approaching an Academy Award-nominated, Golden Globe, and Grammy-winning legend of theatre and asking him if he wanted to recite a five-minute monologue about the origins of the word ‘cunt’.
To make matters even more incredulous, Harris was shooting Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven at the time, and he made a point of returning to the set of the eventual ‘Best Picture’ winner and informing his co-stars, who included Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman, of what a wonderful time he’d had.
While studying at California’s ArtCenter College of Design, aspiring filmmaker Ash Baron-Cohen, the cousin of Sacha, was pondering ideas for his latest academic work when he saw Harris lounging around on a hotel balcony, before boldly walking into the building and asking for his suite number. His request was granted, and the notorious hell-raiser was in typically cantankerous form.
“The first thing I hear is this unmistakable grandiose English voice saying, ‘Who the fuck are you?'” Cohen recalled, per IndieWire. “I said, ‘Look, you don’t know who I am. I’m a young English filmmaker making a student film, and I was wondering if I could have five minutes of your time to get some advice’. He said, ‘Meet me at nine in the morning, on the veranda, for breakfast tomorrow’, and he hung up the phone.”
During their meeting, Harris had a simple question that he wanted answered: “So exactly what the fuck do you want?” Cohen wondered if the decorated star would be interested in making a five-minute cameo in his student flick without any financial compensation, but the prospect of doing something for shits and giggles had its appeal.
“Look, I’m shooting Unforgiven right now,” he was told. “But I tell you what; you write me out a scene, and if I like it, I’ll do it. You won’t have to ask any questions of anyone; we’ll just do it.” Emboldened by the prospect of recruiting one of his generation’s best for free, Cohen decided to go for broke.
“I wrote out this scene about the origin of the word ‘cunt,'” he said. “Which came from Old English and was in Shakespeare and other works of English art. I thought, ‘Either he’s going to like it, or he’s going to headbutt me and force me to leave the hotel.'” Fortunately, Harris loved it, and agreed to shoot it the very next day.
All he needed to do was walk out of the ocean, stroll up to the camera, deliver his lines as written, and then saunter back into the sea and out of shot. It hardly stretched his acting muscles, but swapping the set of a studio-backed genre film for a no-budget student exercise made him feel like a little kid again.
“He called up Clint Eastwood and all his buddies from the hotel room, and was boasting about how he’d had so much fun and how this was what filmmaking was all about,” Cohen reflected. “I remember when I left, he still offered me cab fare to go home.” It was a Hail Mary on his part, but it worked out a treat.
