The 1986 role Michael Caine should have never played: “It was the wrong decision”
In a career that has spanned 60 years, Michael Caine finds himself in the unique position where the films he is making in the twilight of his career are equally as good as the ones that he made in his breakout.
In the 1960s, it seemed as though he entered the cinematic world with a bang. Within the space of five years, from ‘64 onwards, he starred in Zulu, The Ipcress File, Alfie, The Italian Job and Get Carter, films that to this day still stand the test of time as some of his very best. He was charismatic both in a thriller and comedic capacity and proved himself to be Britain’s next major star.
Like a boomerang, the later stages of his career have almost mirrored that brilliance, largely thanks to Christopher Nolan. Caine has teamed up with the British director to lay down some of his best parts in his very best films, from The Dark Knight trilogy to Inception and Interstellar. Caine’s career, for all intents and purposes, has been utterly brilliant from start to finish.
It’s the sort of career most burgeoning actors would dream of, and subsequently fear could elude them should they make the wrong creative decision. The term career suicide often gets thrown around whenever an actor chooses to star in a complete dud, and what follows is an existential panic that a future akin to Caine’s is no longer within grasp.
But Caine himself is proof that you can enjoy a career that spans nearly seven decades, all while shooting some creative misfires. While modern fans might label Cars 2 and King Of Thieves as those films, Caine willingly admits that his mistakes go further back than that, to a time when his career should have really been at its peak: the ‘80s.
“That was at a point in my career when I would do literally anything to appear in a comedy,” he recalled. While comedy was top priority, seen in ‘84’s Blame It on Rio, he tried to establish himself as a number of things in that decade, including an action star on Jaws: The Revenge and a lead in a horror film on The Hand.
But it was this insistence on switching to comedy that landed him in hot water, as he remembered unfondly. “I made Sweet Liberty at about the same time. I should have known it was the wrong decision, looking at the screenplay and seeing how many tits were in the movie.
“I don’t like tits in movies ‘cause I know nobody’s looking at me. Another strike against the movie–it came out just at the same time as a massive amount of publicity about incest, and I think people got the idea I was having the affair with my daughter, rather than my friend’s daughter.”
The eyebrow raises didn’t last long, and Caine ultimately proved that no role is really career suicide. Once the ‘80s concluded, Caine got himself back on track and established the filmography that we all know and love, proving even icons can get it wrong from time to time.
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