Watch Jack Nicholson speak about green energy back in 1978
American actor Jack Nicholson is accepted as one of the most celebrated actors ever to grace the silver screen, finding fame playing Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and R.P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Though he has now retired from acting, he remains recognised as one of the most iconic and influential actors of the 20th century, lending his talents to everything from independent projects to big-budget blockbusters.
Working with some of the biggest names in the industry, including Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Michelangelo Antonioni, Roman Polanski and Miloš Forman, Nicholson enjoyed a fruitful career that lasted over half a century. The unlikely movie How Do You Know, starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson, would mark his final foray into the world of cinema, a far cry from his most celebrated films released in the 1970s.
A bold, counter-cultural figurehead, Nicholson earned a (joint) record of 12 Oscar nominations during his career, winning three for his performances in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Terms of Endearment and As Good as It Gets. Yet, whilst he held a tight grip over the Academy, fascinatingly, the legacy he leaves behind is one that remembers him as an individual on the periphery of the industry, as an ever-eclectic creative with a bohemian soul.
Such was proven back in 1978 when Nicholson appeared on the show Marketplace to popularise the concept of environmentally-friendly automobiles. Speaking the praises of Hydrogen-powered cars, which were made through solar power, the Hollywood icon states in the retro clip: “This change in process right here, will take 58% of the air pollution out of every city in the world…the economy might change, the politics of the world…there are a lot of very good things that could from using the power of the sun”.
He even, somewhat distastefully jokes about how it will “revolutionise suicide, instead of carbon monoxide poisoning, you’ll just get a steam trail”.
Many years later, Nicholson’s comments about the environment seem very ahead of their time, with his co-star in the Martin Scorsese movie The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio, being a significant environmental activist in the urgent need for eco-consciousness in modern society.
Speaking to Variety in 2021 about the crisis, DiCaprio stated, “To see how mankind sort of reacts to this crisis, that the whole issue becomes politicised, that inaction starts to take place, and people start to unravel when they hear news of that calibre”.
The crisis was explored in the Adam McKay movie Don’t Look Up, which the lead actor praises, seeing the environmental themes as a “brilliant hook” that made the star realise, “‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this’…Because it’s very difficult to do a film that’s overtly about this issue”.
Take a look at the clip of Jack Nicholson bigging up green energy in the clip from 1978 below.
