‘The 13th Warrior’: The terrible movie that made Omar Sharif temporarily retire
There’s barely an actor in history who hasn’t lent their name to at least one outright stinker, but some are better at handling it than others. Omar Sharif had such a miserable experience on a torturous flop that he was contemplating giving up on acting altogether, which seems drastic from the outside looking in.
Things must have gone very wrong for someone who’d made their screen debut in 1954 to genuinely consider turning their back on a livelihood they’d been kept gainfully employed in for over half a century at that point, especially when Sharif had remained constantly in demand ever since he gained international prominence for his Academy Award-nominated performance in the timeless Lawrence of Arabia.
It may resemble toys being thrown out of the pram on the surface, but it makes a great deal more sense knowing exactly what film he was talking about. When speaking to Sony Classics, Sharif admitted it was entirely correct that he couldn’t condone the prospect of making any more movies after an infamous debacle that went down in the history books as one of the most nightmarish productions of all time.
“Totally true,” he confirmed, “After my small role in The 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas, I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal-tickets that we do because it pays well’. Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and that makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.'” Were things really that dire, even for a supporting player? Based on the facts, yes, they were.
Die Hard director John McTiernan kicked off production on the adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead in the summer of 1997 before test screenings convinced Disney subsidiaries Touchstone Pictures and Buena Vista there was disaster afoot. Crichton ended up replacing McTiernan behind the camera for extensive reshoots that delayed its release for over a year, with the budget ballooning to a reported $160million in an effort to try and hammer the retitled 13th Warrior into shape.
Sharif was only the fifth-billed member of the cast as Melchizedek, but he was still part of 1999’s biggest flop and one of the heftiest ever after the historical fantasy ended up in the red to the tune of $130million. It was a disaster in every sense of the word, and didn’t he know it.
“Bad pictures are very humiliating. I was really sick,” he explained. “It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.” It would be another four years before Sharif played a major role in another feature. When he finally did, his decision was vindicated because Monsieur Ibrahim won him a César Award for ‘Best Actor’.
