“He’s so slick”: the 1986 role Paul Newman said any actor “would kill for”
While there’s always a clamour for a sequel to a brilliant film, sometimes it takes a long, long time for that sequel to come around.
For a variety of reasons, it can be decades before a follow-up to your favourite movie arrives, and sadly, when they do, they often prove disappointing. But that definitely wasn’t the case with Paul Newman and The Color of Money.
Newman was in his mid-30s when 1961’s The Hustler was made, and he was just starting to get used to the limelight as a movie star, thanks to his success in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor, and The Long, Hot Summer, for which he’d won ‘Best Actor’ at the Cannes Film Festival, but he was a revelation in The Hustler.
The sports drama, based on a hit book and directed by Robert Rossen, told the story of ‘Fast Eddie’ Felson, a small-town pool hustler who dares to take on the notorious Minnesota Fats, played by Jackie Gleason. It was a critical and commercial hit, now seen as one of the classic movies of all time, and it was nominated for eight Oscars, with Newman being nominated for ‘Best Actor’.
23 years then passed before Newman, who was then almost 60, called Martin Scorsese and asked him if he might be interested in directing a sequel to The Hustler, to which the answer came in the affirmative. Newman was very excited at the prospect of bringing back the character he’d originally played to such great effect, saying at the time, ”The delight of a character like Eddie is that he’s had an additional 25 years of hustling. He’s so slick. He’s pulling so many things. There are scenes in this movie an actor would kill for.”
Appearing alongside him in the sequel, The Color of Money, was Tom Cruise, who was fast on his way to becoming the most wanted property in Hollywood, thanks to a string of hits in his early 20s. Later in 1986, he would have a colossal movie with the fighter jet blockbuster Top Gun opposite Val Kilmer, but in this movie, he served as Newman’s young apprentice Vincent Lauria, and he brimmed with the arrogance and charisma that his mentor had displayed back in the early 1960s.
The Color of Money was a success at the box office, although some felt it inferior to the original, but in terms of Academy Awards success, it proved to outstrip the first film for Newman. He landed the top prize of ‘Best Actor’ at the 1987 ceremony for his performance in the film, one of four nominations earned by Scorsese’s sequel.
Cruise, meanwhile, had his own long wait between sequels, when 36 years passed between Top Gun and the follow-up, Top Gun: Maverick, which was released to widespread acclaim in 2022. He’ll have another, not quite as long, break between movies on another franchise when he releases Live Die Repeat and Repeat, the sequel to the stylish 2014 action sci-fi he made with Disclosure Day’s Emily Blunt.
The film’s director, Doug Liman, has said the movie will act as both a sequel and a prequel to that first film in order to make use of the time loop element so effective in the original.
