And he spoke about perhaps his most iconic character: Gordon Gekko, the smooth-talking centerpiece of the 1987 film Wall Street. He was, unambiguousl
And he spoke about perhaps his most iconic character: Gordon Gekko, the smooth-talking centerpiece of the 1987 film Wall Street. He was, unambiguously, the villain of that film. Yet audiences have always been drawn to him. “He dressed very nice,” said Douglas. “He was powerful.” After that movie, said Douglas, he was constantly approached by bankers who said, “You are the one that got me into Wall Street.” Douglas’s incredulous response? “I was the bad guy!”
Another Douglas masterpiece turns 50 this year: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which the actor produced. One of film’s biggest hurdles, said Douglas, was how hard it was to find an actor to play Nurse Ratched. “They all turned the part down because in 1975, a woman—and this is because of the woman’s movement—could not play a villain. Whereas the men all want to do villain parts. The villain parts were always the most fun; they were the best. So I always thought that was strange.” The role was eventually taken by Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for her performance.
Douglas did not hesitate to name his greatest stroke of luck: “marrying my wife, Catherine [Zeta-Jones].” That came about thanks to chance, he added. “I remember reading in a magazine article that she was doing a movie with Sean Connery, and the article said, Oh, she likes older men. She does. So that was the stroke of luck.”
Aging in Hollywood, said Douglas, is probably not as much a problem for him “as for women, especially someone like Sharon [Stone, his Basic Instinct costar] or my wife, Catherine—people that are known. But on the same breath, as I’m looking at my youngest kids—my 22-year-old daughter wants to be an actress, and my 24-year-old son wants to be an actor. My daughter is getting more attention. So the ladies get attention younger than the guys do, but the guys end up going a little later.”
Douglas himself comes from a legendary acting dynasty. He was asked what his father, Kirk Douglas, said to him when he won his first acting Oscar; Douglas replied, “He said, ‘If I knew he was going to be so successful, I would’ve been nicer to him.’” Kirk was joking, Douglas added.
There are times when he worries about the future—especially how AI-generated likenesses may affect the art of acting. “I’m very pessimistic, only because I’ve seen what happened with social media, and now they’re telling us, ‘Oh, we’ll get the guardrails on AI,’” he said. “I don’t think they are.” And the technology is just beginning to develop. “I was at a conference recently with a lot of major tech experts, and they all said, ‘In the next five years or less, you’re not going to recognize this planet.’ The power of AI and robots is going to happen. It’s going to explode.”
But Douglas also has cause for hope. “Gen Z, I have real hopes for. I really hope that they are going to politically push the elderly out and clean up this mess.” They face an uphill battle in Hollywood, though. “I think it is very hard to become a star. They don’t want to promote movie stars, because movie stars are expensive; they would rather promote AI or CGIs. My real hope is—my son is on the town council in our town. He’s 50 years younger than the next person. Somebody has got to assume these responsibilities. Because rather than dealing with the top down, we have to start from the bottom up. We have to make our mayors, our local town council members, our local judges responsible. So hopefully more and more people will be getting politically active in local politics.”
Original story in VF Italia.
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