‘The Murder of Napoleon’: The role Jack Nicholson was desperate to play for Stanley Kubrick
There are some stories that everyone in Hollywood is dying to tell, with filmmakers battling over the rights to certain books and biographies in the hopes that they will one day hit the jackpot and create something that everyone has been dying to see. It could be Denis Villeneuve’s long-lasting obsession with the Dune series or Luca Guadagnino’s desire to adapt William Burrough’s novel Queer from the age of 18. Or it could even be Baz Luhrmann’s secret goal of making a film about Alexander the Great before Oliver Stone got there first.
With the power to realise just about any story on screen, it is hardly surprising that the directors working today have set their sights on these classic grand tales, but there are some who were never able to realise these ambitions at all.
Ridley Scott’s 2023 Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby, was, unfortunately, a convoluted mess and widely regarded as another blemish on his filmography. However, long before Scott took on the story, another director had a vision for it—one that likely would have placed the tale in far more capable hands. The legendary Stanley Kubrick had long been fascinated with the figure of Napoleon and planned an epic film about his life. Sadly, the project never materialised, leaving both Kubrick’s vision unfulfilled and Jack Nicholson, who was eager to portray Napoleon in what he considered his dream role, deeply disappointed.
Nicholson has portrayed a staggering number of iconic characters over the years, with a stellar streak of films in the ‘70s as he starred in Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Passenger and later on The Shining. The collaboration has gone down in history, with Nicholson being considered the greatest actor of all time and Kubrick as the greatest director, leading to a monumental and groundbreaking story that continues to be timeless in its impact and legacy.
However, the pair only worked together once despite making loose plans to reunite for a Napoleon picture. Nicholson even bought the rights to a book called The Murder of Napoleon, hoping to either star in it or produce it himself.
When discussing this, Nicholson said, “’I’ve invested a lot in the subject. I sort of look at it like Shaw, Nietzsche, those kind of thinkers did, who consider Napoleon the man. When I was thinking about him, I got a feeling of autobiography about it – again, in terms of poetics – in the sense that he was a man who conquered the world twice. And became a symbol for the Devil. That’s the way they described him in England”.
Nicholson has always been fascinated by playing dark and complex characters, and his description of Napoleon as being similar to the devil reveals a lot about his creative interests. While he was never allowed to tackle Napoleon himself, he played a host of other devilish characters, finding other ways of fulfilling this goal through his twisted and manic roles in The Shining and The Departed.
