by Gill Pringle in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
He recently turned 80, but double Oscar winner Michael Douglas says he cannot rest until he’s tackled the horror genre!
Douglas has done just about everything else in his 60-year career, and now he just needs to scare an audience.
Even as recently as the past decade, he’s been ticking off his bucket list – tackling comedy with series The Kominsky Method; period costume drama with mini-series Franklin portraying Benjamin Franklin; even entering the MCU with the Ant-Man franchise.
As Dr Hank Pym, he plays a physicist and the OG Ant-Man fighting alongside Michelle Pfeiffer as Janet Van Dyne, his wife and the original Wasp.
The Ant-Man films even enabled him to achieve Marvel immortality, appearing in Avengers: Endgame.
“Those are the things I wanted to do,” he says at the 4th Red Sea International Film Festival. “In the last few years, when I looked, I said: ‘What haven’t I done?’ I love comedy. I’ve done a couple of pictures like War of the Roses, and a few others where we had comedy, but I wanted to do a comedy series.
“And then Chuck Lorre, who’s a great writer, came up with this streaming show The Kominsky Method, so this was an opportunity late in my career to try to understand comedy, the timing and what makes somebody comedic.
“I have a deep appreciation for comedy, because it never gets [Oscar] nominated for Best Picture. Hardly ever does an actor who’s a comedian, get nominated, and we all cherish our friends who are funny. The Kominsky Method gave me a kind of a sense of comedy – and some nominations,” he reflects.
“And then, I’d never done one of these green screen movies. I often wondered, how do you act with that? I have great new respect for green screen acting after doing those Marvel movies.
“And with Franklin, I’d never done a period movie. It was all contemporary to the time. So Franklin kind of covered the gamut.
“And now, I don’t know? I’m having a very nice time enjoying my life. Thank you. I wouldn’t say I am retired but I still have to find the horror genre!” he laughs, although it’s clear he’s not entirely joking.
“I really have never taken a break in my career, which is almost 60 years now. I had a cancer bout about 15 years ago, when I had a little break, but I’ve always been doing something. I decided to take some time off, that was 2023. And now I’ve almost finished 2024 and I’m enjoying it so much.”
With more than 70 movies and hundreds of hours of television – dating back to his breakthrough hit series, The Streets of San Francisco in his early 20s – he reflects on an extraordinary life filled with achievements.
The veteran actor and son of Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas, confesses to being struck by stage fright in the early years of his career.
He hadn’t even planned on becoming an actor, admitting to a certain amount of resentment towards the profession that had robbed him of spending time with his father as a child. “I thought it would be easy. That’s the only reason I took theater and then I started it, and I was terrible, absolutely terrible. Terrible stage fright.
“When I’d do a play, I used to have a waste basket off stage and before I’d go on, I’d get sick in the waste basket. I had such terrible stage fright, I’ve always wondered why I continued.
“But in any event, after I graduated, I went to New York and started working in theater and taking acting classes. And the biggest help for me was an acting teacher who helped me get more comfortable standing up in front of people, and so that was a tremendous aid,” he says.
“But it still doesn’t take away the nerves and part of the challenge of acting is, for me, the risk. I like flying without a net. So, there’s a risk factor, which always gives you the nerves when you’re starting a project, but then you learn that nerves are just part of your career, part of your work.”
Married to actress Catherine Zeta-Jones for the past 24 years, the couple have two children who are also exploring following in the family business.
But please don’t call it nepotism. “There was a snarky article in New York Magazine, I think about 2 years ago, about second generation actors working,” he says about the article that coined the term ‘nepo baby’. “I thought, how snarky. I don’t know a father in whatever business, be it a plumber or a contractor or a carpenter who doesn’t try to help his son or daughter join in. I took offense with that article, and then the reality is I’m a nepo baby too. So that’s the way it goes.”
Despite working with many important filmmakers, including Milos Forman, Robert Zemeckis and Steven Soderbergh, Douglas believes he learned the most from his Wall Street director Oliver Stone under whose guidance he earned a Best Actor Oscar as Gordon Gekko in 1987. “Directors tend to be like father figures. They tend to treat actors and actresses as their children and they’re the patriarch. An example is Oliver Stone, who is the toughest director I’ve ever worked with, but also excellent. If you look at his work, probably in every film, the actor in that film gave the best performances of their career. From James Woods in Salvador or Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July. Then Val Kilmer in Doors; Kevin Costner in JFK, or my performance in Wall Street. Now why? Because he was tough. I remember the second week of Wall Street, he came into my trailer. This is Gordon Gekko now, and he looks at me and he says: ‘Are you okay?’ I say: ‘Yeah’. Then he asks: ‘You doing drugs?’ ‘No.’
“And he says, ‘Because you look like you never acted before in your life’. I thought, ‘I never looked at the dailies but when a director tells you that, you better take a look’. So I go into the room, and I look at a couple of the scenes – the seduction scene with Charlie Sheen in the back of the car…
“And I’m very critical, but it looks pretty good, so I see Oliver and I say: ‘Oliver, I thought it was OK?’ And he says: ‘Yeah, it is, isn’t it?’
“But what Oliver wanted was a little more nastiness, and he was willing for me to hate him for the rest of the picture, just to get that little more of an edge. I remain eternally grateful to him, however he can do it,” says the actor who also won a Best Picture Oscar very early on his career for co-producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, having acquired the rights to the Ken Kesey novel from his father.
One of the most bankable stars in Hollywood for many years, among his most memorable films are The China Syndrome, Romancing the Stone, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Traffic.
Ask him where he keeps all those awards, he smiles, “This sounds so gauche – there’s so many of them. I have some of them in the apartment in New York and some in our house in the country.”
