The role Steve McQueen wanted to delete from history: “I don’t want to talk about that movie”
One of the many reasons Steve McQueen became a superstar was that he embodied Hollywood cool. In his most famous roles, he was charming, charismatic, and completely unflappable, but it turned out that even the suavest of A-listers could be embarrassed by a performance from their past.
McQueen was almost a decade into his professional career when he broke through in a major way. Once The Magnificent Seven delivered his first certified box office smash, there was no looking back. He proved to be a difficult presence during shooting and rubbed several of his co-stars the wrong way, which would become a recurring theme.
Still, even the trickiest of customers can be forgiven by filmmakers and studio heads when they consistently bring in the big bucks, something that McQueen managed effortlessly as he spent the 1960s cementing himself as one of the industry’s biggest attractions and most reliable drawing cards.
By the turn of the 1970s, he was the single highest-paid performer in the industry, and he was well aware of that status, which boiled over when he became embroiled in one of the pettiest dick-measuring contests in cinema history when partnered with Paul Newman in the disaster classic The Towering Inferno.
A one-time Academy Award and four-time Golden Globe nominee, McQueen had the acting chops to back up his bankability, but one thing he couldn’t condone was being asked about his feature debut. Everyone has to start somewhere, and for ‘The King of Cool’, it was 1958’s cult favourite sci-fi horror, The Blob, which was the first credited leading role in his filmography.
After recouping its budget almost 40 times over in ticket sales, it was an immensely profitable picture, influencing multiple generations of creature features. As hard as he tried to distance himself from it when his star began its unstoppable rise, the fact he was in The Blob was an inescapable one that McQueen bristled at even being referenced.
In one of his final interviews before his death in November 1980 at the age of 50 with Richard Kraus, McQueen was promoting The Hunter, which turned out to be his last film. When The Blob was mentioned, the actor made a point of changing the subject as quickly as possible.
“Let’s not talk about that,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about that movie. Next question.” Sure enough, the movie wasn’t mentioned again, with McQueen desperate to avoid saying anything about his debut as a leading man.
It was an important film within the context of his career because it was the first time he received top billing, something that would become the norm just a few short years later, but he’d much rather pretend that it never existed.
