The 1974 scene Sean Connery couldn’t stand shooting: “He was absolutely enraged”
There’s enough testimony from actors and filmmakers to establish that Sean Connery was not somebody you wanted to get on the wrong side of, so you can only imagine how he responded to a scene he abhorred shooting taking an entire day to finish.
The original James Bond didn’t suffer fools, as he displayed when he disarmed a gun-wielding Johnny Stompanato on the set of 1958’s Another Time, Another Place, with the notorious gangster taking issue with the chemistry generated on the set between Connery and his then-paramour, Lana Turner.
As a result, on his first visit to Hollywood to shoot Darby O’Gill and the Little People for Disney, Stompanato’s boss, the even more notorious Mickey Cohen, managed to track the actor down to his hotel room, call him on the telephone, and tell him to get his arse out of Los Angeles, or else.
It wasn’t always about being a tough guy, though; Connery did Michael Bay a solid when he sat in on a meeting with a studio executive when they were making The Rock, and the natural intimidation factor he provided made the suit shit himself, and any issues they had with the director’s work were quickly forgotten.
He was known to have a short fuse and an even shorter temper, but he wasn’t naturally antagonistic. Connery had the natural Scottish disposition to tell it like it is, and when things weren’t going to his satisfaction, he was always capable of flying off the handle, losing his shit, and terrifying anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.
One unfortunate crew member discovered that on the set of John Boorman’s Zardoz, and as if parading around Ireland for the duration of the shoot in preposterous red underpants wasn’t enough to push Connery to his breaking point, having to redo a scene he fucking hated shooting the first time around did the trick.
“At the end of the film, we shoot a scene where his character ages rapidly, and with the makeup, that scene took a whole day,” Boorman explained. “So we’d shoot a bit, take him out, put on more makeup, shoot a bit more, and so on. When we finished it, we sent the film to the lab, and the lab scratched it. So we had to do it all over again the following day.”
It took a brave soul to inform the leading man that circumstances outside of their control had conspired to ruin a loathsome day’s work, but Boorman bit the bullet. “Sean hated makeup, hated anything touching his skin,” the filmmaker added. “He was very grumpy the whole day when we shot the scene. So when I told him that we had to do it again, he was absolutely enraged. Enraged!”
The director and everyone else working on Zardoz, for that matter, must have spent the entire day walking on eggshells. Connery had made it perfectly clear that the ageing scene was something he despised every second of, so you can only imagine how nervous everyone felt when he had to do the exact same thing all over again the very next day.
