“I knew I was doing alright with him”: the secret code for earning Sean Connery’s respect
Earning respect from Sean Connery didn’t come easy and definitely wasn’t something he handed out on a whim. Fortunately, the actor had an obvious tell that instantly made it clear to anybody they’d made it onto his good side, even if staying there wasn’t always guaranteed.
One person—or fictional character, in this case—who wasn’t always worthy of Connery’s respect was the defining role of his career. During his initial stint as James Bond, the actor grew increasingly frustrated with the role’s limitations, to the point he openly admitted he hated playing Ian Fleming’s creation by the end.
However, he remained respectful of what it meant to him personally and professionally, as well as audiences around the world. That’s one of the reasons he called successor George Lazenby a “prize shit” for turning his nose up at a multi-picture contract, intimating that 007 is a job that’s simply too big for certain performers to handle.
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman director Stephen Norrington definitely didn’t get his respect, either, with Connery having such a miserable time shooting the turgid comic book adaptation that he announced his retirement from acting, but not after instructing journalists at the world premiere that perhaps the “local insane asylum” was the best place to begin their search for the absent filmmaker.
By the turn of the 1990s, Connery was an Academy Award-winning veteran who exuded gravitas and authority, which made it daunting for any relatively inexperienced filmmaker to try to make a winning impression. John McTiernan’s previous movie was a little thing called Die Hard, but even then, he was daunted by the icon when shooting The Hunt for Red October.
They would reunite on 1992’s Medicine Man to underline the positive impression McTiernan had made, but as he explained to Alex Simon, he was already on solid ground by then. “I knew I was doing alright with him when he began calling me ‘boy,'” he said. “At the end of the night, he’d say, ‘Good night, boy.'”
It might only be three letters, but it was the utmost seal of approval. Harrison Ford was one of the biggest stars in the world when he made Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Connery, but he would have been thrilled when his onscreen father developed the habit of calling him ‘boy’ even when the cameras weren’t rolling.
When Michael Bay was filming his second feature, The Rock, he’d heard Connery “was notoriously tough on directors.” What made him feel confident he was on the right path? “I was terrified when I gave him my first direction, ‘Uh, Sean, can you please do that less charming?'” he recalled. “He said, ‘Sure, boy’. ‘Boy’ was the nickname he gave me.”
These were all grown adults and working professionals, but nobody had any issues with Connery calling them ‘boy’ because it guaranteed that his respect had been earned.
