The role Jack Nicholson waited 45 years to play: “As an actor, let me at it”
It’s hard to imagine Jack Nicholson pining for any role, given that his filmography consists of the greatest Hollywood heavyweights in the business. You’d perhaps assume that he had his pick of the bunch and didn’t waste any time sitting around and yearning for an opportunity – if he wants something, chances are that he can get it. But the actor perhaps learned a surprising lesson in humility after realising that he hadn’t achieved it all, and there was one role he was dying to play that manifested surprisingly late in life.
While some people pine after the interiors in Nancy Meyers’ films, whether it be the Californian vineyard in The Parent Trap or the sweet English cottage in The Holiday, it turns out that Nicholson was secretly yearning for the chance to star in a rom-com. It’s a genre that has captured our hearts for many years, with audiences wanting to indulge in the delusional romanticism of relationships that frankly wouldn’t stand a chance in the outside world.
However, when living in a Nancy Meyers film, love is always portrayed in a slightly more realistic and complicated way, with stories about couples who find each other after many ups and downs and grapple with their own personal flaws and how they affect their relationships. Perhaps this is what drew Nicholson towards the idea of working with Meyers, with the actor joining forces with the director in 2003 for Something’s Gotta Give.
The film follows a toxic bachelor who visits his younger girlfriend’s mother at her house in the Hamptons, inadvertently finding himself falling in love with her mother after a sudden heart attack. In typical rom-com fashion, a thorny love triangle is formed, with Nicholson’s character learning a thing or two about love, intimacy and his attitude towards women.
While we associate Nicholson with much darker roles, the actor was head-over-heels in love with the opportunity to star in something a bit lighter, saying, “When you get to a certain point in your life as an actor. I don’t know how much romantic anything I am going to be able to represent to anybody. To find this, which is so believable and so artfully written? As an actor, let me at it.”
This reaction was a jackpot moment for Meyers, with the director fleshing out a cast of top-notch actors who perfectly realised her vision, adding, “I heard from him within a week. I heard from him right away. It was the greatest call of my life, really. He was amazing. He said great things. But the most charming thing he said was, ‘I’ve always wanted to be in a tuxedo comedy.’ Nobody’s in a tuxedo in the movie, but you get that he’s referencing a screwball of some sort or one of the more classic, you know, Hollywood love story-comedies. It was a great phone call. He was lovely.”
In many ways, the plot does resemble the tone of early screwball comedies like His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, with a bizarre and convoluted plot that continually escalates to new levels of madness. While they might be bonkers, that’s exactly the reason why we love them, and something that appealed to a different side of a typically dark actor.
