Michael Caine recalls the one occasion he was psychotic on set: “I went apeshit”
Actors tend to be a touchy and temperamental bunch at the best of times, especially if they practice the method. That being said, Michael Caine has always come across as a cool and collected customer, even if there’s one isolated incident to thank for that.
In the early years of his career, Caine wasn’t quite the zen-like figure he became known as, but he did go out of his way to prevent his anger from getting the better of him. Throughout his career, the two-time Academy Award winner has tackled almost every genre under the sun, with a solitary exception.
He’s been in action movies, dramas, thrillers, comedies, sci-fi, creature features, disaster epics, comic book adaptations and almost anything anyone can think of, but never a western. Why? Because he has no interest in riding a horse either on-screen or off, which is also tied to his one-time outburst that had the crew fearing for their lives.
It’s difficult to imagine the amiable Caine with steam coming out of his ears, but it happened. Only once, though, and all he needed was a stiff drink and a heartfelt conversation to realise the error of his ways. From that day forward, never again would he allow his emotions to get the better of him when they weren’t in service of the character he was playing at the time.
By his own admission, Caine went “psychotic” when he struggled to wrangle a horse while shooting James Clavell’s 1971 historical drama The Last Valley after “the fucking thing ran away for two miles and I nearly got killed.” He was not a happy chappie, something the unfortunate folks in his vicinity were about to discover first-hand.
“When I got back I went apeshit at everybody,” Caine confessed to GQ, until the director appeared with a peace offering in the shape of vodka. “We each had a glass of vodka in the middle of the day which neither of us ever did,” he explained. “And he said, ‘What you have just done is shown one of the most intimate emotions, and you must never do that.'”
Clavell instructed his rage-fuelled leading man to apologise, which he did. “He was being totally Japanese about it,” Caine recalled. “And that has been my philosophy ever since.” From the filmmaker’s point of view, those intimate and unfiltered emotions weren’t to be directed at strangers and colleagues on set but reserved by the people closest to the simmering subject.
Just like that, Caine’s eyes had been opened to a completely different mindset, one where he theoretically wouldn’t raise his voice were he to be almost killed by another equine co-star in another film. For the next 50 years until his eventual retirement, his temper never flared in the midst of production again.
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