Did Roy Scheider feign insanity to dodge ‘Jaws 2’ role?
Few filmmakers can claim to have had such a diverse and potent impact on cinema over the past half-century as Steven Spielberg. His expansive oeuvre ranges from the child-oriented wonder of E.T. and The Land Before Time to the abject horror of Jaws and Saving Private Ryan. While his movies vary so wildly stylistically and thematically, Spielberg maintains a crucial constant of spectacular cinematography, flawless casting and memorable soundtrack scores.
Perhaps the most iconic and important movie of Spielberg’s early career was 1975’s Jaws. The classic thriller starred the late great Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, who, with the help of a marine biologist portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss and a professional shark hunter played by Robert Shaw, tracks down a man-eating great white shark that causes havoc off the coast of a popular summer holiday destination in the US.
The movie was an unmitigated sensation, garnering Spielberg universal acclaim and the key to an exciting future in Hollywood. As we know, this future was seized in style, but that didn’t involve the direction of Jaws 2, a movie regarded as superfluous and potentially damaging.
In October 1975, Spielberg announced at the San Francisco Film Festival that “making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick”. Needless to say, he didn’t hesitate to decline when producers approached him with a plan for a sequel. In the Making of Jaws 2 documentary by Laurent Bouzereau, producer David Brown explained that Spielberg felt he had made the “definitive shark movie” in the first and had no zeal to tarnish it with repetition.
In a 2012 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Spielberg also revealed that his aversion to rough seafaring was another factor in his decision to call it quits after the first Jaws movie. “I would have done the sequel if I hadn’t had such a horrible time at sea on the first film,” he claimed.
It transpires that Roy Scheider also voiced doubts about Jaws 2. Like Spielberg, he argued that a sequel could add nothing to the story, and the scary shark premise would tire rapidly. In 1977, Scheider pulled out of his role as Michael Vronsky in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter due to creative disputes, leaving the door open for Robert De Niro. However, since he was under a three-movie contract with Universal, the production giant offered an olive branch if he agreed to appear in Jeannot Szwarc’s Jaws 2.
According to Diane C. Kachmar in his 2002 book, Roy Scheider: A Film Biography, Scheider was so averse to the sequel that he “pleaded insanity and went crazy in The Beverly Hills Hotel”. Time would tell who was really crazy, Scheider or the crew that thought Jaws 2 was a good idea.
Ultimately, Scheider was offered a handsome payslip to reprise his role as Brody and, considering his contract with Universal, saw fit to oblige. As Scheider feared, Jaws 2 was a drop in the ocean in comparison to the legacy and critical reception of its predecessor. Despite mixed critical reviews, the movie was a box office hit and has been regarded as the best of the three Jaws sequels in retrospect.
Watch the trailer for Jaws 2 below.
