The Sean Connery role Paul Newman was rejected for: “We simply don’t want you to make the film”
Even though they hailed from opposite sides of the world and rose to fame under very different circumstances, in the broadest possible sense, Paul Newman and Sean Connery were cut from a similar cloth.
They were both roguishly handsome, naturally charismatic, and exuded an effortless screen presence, and they each struck the gold of superstardom in the 1960s. Separated in age by just five years, it’s not unreasonable to assume they were regularly part of the same casting conversations when they ticked a lot of the same boxes.
Connery and Newman were proven commodities, household names, and were equally capable of being a warm and endearing presence on-screen as they were exuding danger and easy-going charm, and large swathes of the cinemagoing population would go weak at the knees at the mere sight of them.
It was a mid-career part that initially came Newman’s way before ultimately being played by Connery, though, with the former offered the chance to develop it himself as a starring vehicle under a specific set of terms and conditions the other partners in the film clearly didn’t want him to achieve. Or at least, that was the way Newman told it to Leonard Probst.
“Under certain circumstances, I can do a film if I can bring in a piece of material that will cost less than $3 million,” he explained. “I get no salary; I participate much later, once the budget is in and if it’s under $3 million, they can’t stop me from making the picture.” In this case, Newman planned to disappear into the part, but his prospective partners didn’t sound too convinced.
“With this picture, they said, ‘How do you plan to play it?’. And I said, ‘I’m not sure. I would want to look older and I will probably want to put on some weight, I will probably have a beard. And they said, ‘Yes, we suspected as much’. And they said the picture would cost about $3.5 million without me getting anything, because it is not a small production,” Newman continued. “They said, ‘We can’t stop you from doing the film if you can bring it under $3 million, but we know you can’t do that. We simply don’t want you to make the film’. They don’t want to see me play a part like that.”
The project in question would have seen Newman playing legendary outlaw Robin Hood after he’d come back from the Crusades when “he was over the hill and he was having trouble getting up over those walls.” Just four months after he revealed he wasn’t wanted, Richard Lester’s Robin and Marian with Connery and Aubrey Hepburn in the title roles hit cinemas.
For comparison’s sake, the budget of the end product was $5m, a lot more than the figure Newman was quoted and then issued an ultimatum for when he signalled his interest to star.
