The 2004 co-star Diane Kruger couldn’t stand working with: “He’s dead, so I can say that”
Given that Diane Kruger turns 50 this week and has a 24-year career behind her, it’s probably not all that surprising that she has a few co-stars with whom she didn’t get on well.
But rather like Thomas Tuchel just single-handedly ruined English football forever, the German actor decided to take a dagger to our hearts in naming a legend of British cinema as the main culprit.
Kruger to be fair to her has worked with some of the most traditionally and divisive stars over her decades on screen, including the famously erratic Dennis Hopper first time out when she made her film debut in 2002’s The Piano Player, a made-for-TV film in which she did enough that she was not only cast in a couple of major French movies the following year, but 2004’s thriller Wicker Park with Josh Hartnett, who was very much in demand at the time.
It was undoubtedly the movie that she made later that year that changed everything for her, however. Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy was a sprawling, big-budget historical epic based on Homer’s Iliad with a truly stellar cast headed by Brad Pitt. Kruger took her place as Helen of Troy alongside names like Eric Bana, Rose Byrne and Orlando Bloom, plus established vintage talent like Julie Christie and Lawrence of Arabia’s Peter O’Toole.
And unfortunately, it was the latter who rubbed Kruger up the wrong way, although not literally, obviously. A few years back, Kruger sat down with The Walking Dead’s Norman Reedus for Buzzfeed while they were making a film together, and revealed the worst colleagues they’d ever had.
Kruger said, “You know who wasn’t very pleasant, was Peter O’Toole. It kind of sucked… He’s dead, so I can say that, but he wasn’t the most pleasant person.”
Pushed further by Reedus on why O’Toole turned out to be ‘such a dick’, Kruger continued, “He was just a drunk, and Peter O’Toole… You know, he had a two-day part, and I played Helen of Troy, and he was Peter O’Toole, and he just wanted to make sure that everybody knew that he was Peter O’Toole, and he could barely make it up the stairs.”
She explained, “We were on a set that was – you know, you have to climb, like, I don’t know, 100 steps to go up… everybody thought he was gonna die right there and then. Because it was, you know, 120 degrees, and he had to walk up 100 stairs. And he was very old, and very drunk.”
The more alcoholic memories of O’Toole should certainly come as no surprise to anyone. Although without doubt one of Britain’s great acting talents, O’Toole, who was honoured by the Academy and won four Golden Globes, a Bafta and an Emmy in his time, was ravaged by his addiction to drink, which almost killed him in the 1970s, leading to emergency stomach surgery.
Together with other luminaries like Richard Harris and Richard Burton, O’Toole would place as much importance on drinking as his work, and once, after being refused service for being too inebriated, simply pulled out a chequebook and bought the bar outright so he could continue supping.
Kruger, meanwhile, had a couple of acclaimed TV series last year in the form of The Seduction and Little Disasters, and has wrapped filming an upcoming sci-fi with Mads Mikkelsen called AMI, about an astronaut crash-landing on a planet with only an AI system for company, which, given ChatGPT thinks there are three ‘b’s in blueberry, doesn’t bode very well.
