The scene that frightened the life out of Sean Connery: “Do you think the bridge looks safe?”
In the annals of Hollywood history, few actors embodied a stereotypical ideal of masculinity more than Sean Connery. After all, for much of his career, the Scottish icon played a hairy-chested lothario and man of action who was admired by men and wanted by women. Connery came up in a different era, though, which may have been why he wasn’t as open with the press about anything that could have punctured this image, such as the things he feared. For instance, one scene in one of his most famous movies scared the life out of him – much to his director and co-star’s amusement.
Interestingly, Connery’s history of being forced to face his fears on movie sets goes back to 1962’s Dr No, the first time he played iconic super spy James Bond. In that film, there is a scene in which a tarantula crawls across Bond’s chest. The production enlisted a harmless Pink-toe Tarantula, a favourite among movie spider experts because of its small fangs and reluctance to bite – but Connery was so deathly afraid of spiders that he refused to let the hairy beast touch his skin. Director Terence Young shot the scene with a thin sheet of glass over Connery’s chest, which provided a barrier to the spider, but the results weren’t impressive, so stuntman Bob Simmons was drafted in to accomplish the shot.
Fast forward to 1975, and Connery again found himself battling one of his phobias. You see, he was never comfortable with heights, so it was to his mounting horror that he realised that The Man Who Would Be King director John Huston intended for him to walk out into the middle of a rickety-looking rope bridge suspended over a 100-foot drop in North Africa’s Atlas Mountains.
Connery’s co-star, Michael Caine, found his nervousness about the scene amusing. However, he was even more tickled by Huston’s no-nonsense approach to Connery raising his concerns. The iconic Get Carter star told Sabotage Times in 2011, “Sean Connery’s not the biggest fan of heights. There was a day when we were shooting on the rope bridge, and Sean turned to John and said, ‘Do you think the bridge looks safe?'”
We can only imagine how small and embarrassed Connery must have felt when Huston completely disregarded his legitimate fear of heights by deadpanning, “Sean, the bridge looks the way it always has. The only difference is that today, you’re going to be standing in the middle of it.”
Ultimately, Connery stepped up to the plate and walked on the rope bridge, but he most certainly wasn’t the person who did what came next. Stuntman Joe Powell was the poor soul tasked with taking a nosedive off the bridge into the cavernous ravine below, with only a target area covered in boxes to break his fall. Indeed, if Powell hadn’t calculated his fall perfectly and missed the boxes, he would have continued a further 2,000 feet into the abyss below.
Huston called Powell’s fearless fall “the darnedest stunt I ever saw,” while Caine was too anxious to even watch it occur. He reportedly declared, “I’m not going to watch this one,” and we can only assume Connery, who was already so terrified of heights, adopted the same tactic.
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