Michael Douglas Says He Is Enjoying Career Break As He Turns 80 But Jokes He Would Be Open To A Horror Movie – Red Sea Film Festival
Michael Douglas has revealed he has been enjoying a career break over the past two years but is still open to taking on projects that introduce him to a new genre or type of role, such as a horror movie.
The Wall Street and Fatal Attraction actor who turned 80 in September told an an onstage conversation at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival that he had been taking time off for the first time in nearly 60 years, apart from when he was being treated for cancer in 2013.
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“I’ve just had my 80th birthday,” said the actor, who explained he had decided to take a break after playing Benjamin Franklin in Franklin.
“I took 2023 off and I’ve now nearly finished 2024… I’m having a very nice time enjoying my life,” he said.
Prior to stopping, the actor said he had taken on roles that stretched his repertoire including The Kominsky Method, which gave him an opportunity to explore comedy in more depth; Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which saw him work with the green screen for the first time, and Franklin, which was a rare costume drama after a career playing roles set mainly in contemporary settings.
The actor is attending the Red Sea Film Festival with wife and actor Catherine Zeta-Jones alongside a slew of stars including Michelle Yeoh, Eva Longoria, Andrew Garfield, Ranbir Kapoor, Cynthia Erivo, Brendan Fraser, Shraddha Kapoor, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jeremy Renner.
His on-stage conversation touched on his early acting break in TV show, The Streets of San Francisco; how he got his first producer credit on Oscar-winner One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, after his father Kirk Douglas had originally optioned the book with a plan to take Jack Nicholson’s role for himself; and later films such as The China Syndrome, Wall Street, Fatal Attraction and The War Of The Roses.
Looking back at his career, Douglas said one of his few regrets was getting so caught up in producing in the wake of the success of One Flew Out Of The Cuckoo’s Nest.
“Careful what you wish for,” he said. “I had a big production company. I financed my own movies. The producing aspect of my life sort of took over, and I would find myself in movies I was producing, and that is not a good combination,” he said, suggesting it had taken the joy out of acting.
“There’s a wonderful book called ‘The Joy of Acting’. The joy of acting is how selfish you can be. All they’re asking of you is to deal with what is right in front of you and nothing else.”
Producing, he continued, required a 360 degree understanding of everything that was going on in a feature.
“I go back to Romancing the Stone. I was so grateful to have Kathleen Turner. I could be with acting with her and then someone would come in and say, ‘We’ve got a problem with a location’, and then you’re split.”
Douglas recounted how after a day of acting he would then get caught up in working on other projects in development at his company.
“I would finish acting and then there would be a pile of crap, scripts that we were developing that I would then have to go through, making all my notes for them and all of that. So, the job became overwhelming. There were about 20 years in there which I could have simplified and probably enjoyed life more.”
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