Michael Douglas won an Academy Award for his portrayal of infamous villain Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 thriller Wall Street, but the director’s criticism was a hard pill to swallow.
Douglas had to embody ruthless ambition, greed and moral ambiguity with excellence, and the director wasn’t satisfied by his performance initially.
In a recent interview with TCM’s Alicia Malone, the Basic Instinct star recalled Stone’s brutally honest remarks about his acting two weeks into the filming.
“Okay, so we were finishing the second week of filming, and there was a knock on my door. ‘Hey Mike, it’s Oliver. Can I come in?'” the 81-year-old recalled.
“I say, ‘Yeah, come on in.’ He comes in the trailer and sits down. He says to me, ‘You okay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m okay.'”
“[He asks], ‘Are you doing drugs?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not doing drugs.’ And he said, ‘Because you look like you’ve never acted before in your life,'” the actor continued.
The Game actor confessed that he hadn’t seen the dailies, the raw footage filmed everyday, by that point.
“So I said, ‘Well, I don’t like to look at the dailies because I’m one of those guys that always sees what’s wrong or what’s not going to be in the film’… so I don’t pay attention to the dailies,” Douglas noted.
“So I said, ‘I guess I’d better take a look,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you better.’ “
“And I’m looking at them really hard, and critically, and they seemed pretty good. So I keep saying, ‘I think it’s pretty good,’ and [Stone said], ‘Yeah, it is, isn’t it,'” he recalled.
Despite the harsh criticism, the Fatal Attraction star praised the director for bringing out the best in him.
“He was willing for me to hate his guts for the rest of this movie to get that extra little push,” Douglas said.
