Throughout the years, Michael Caine has appeared in over 160 roles across film, television, and stage – many of which he remains proud of, and many that have gone on to earn critical acclaim and awards. From The Ipcress File and The Man Who Would Be King to The Cider House Rules and The Dark Knight, Caine has left an undeniable mark on cinema.
But even with decades of success to his name – from his 1960s breakthrough to the present day – there was one film he openly admitted he hated making.
Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2010, Caine reflected candidly on the 1990s, a period in which, by his own admission, he began taking jobs that didn’t exactly excite him. Coming off a busy and fulfilling end to 1991, he entered 1992 with a fail: Noises Off, a comedy that flopped both critically and commercially.
“I wasn’t too bothered,” he said at the time. “Everyone has a flop now and then, I thought.”
But that moment marked the beginning of a downward trend in his career: “I was completely oblivious to the downturn in store for me. Looking back to this period I can see now what I couldn’t see then: the storm clouds, as they say, were gathering.”
At 58, Caine didn’t feel old – and he didn’t expect Hollywood to think so either. But the scripts that started arriving told a different story.
“I sat down to read one [script]. I was appalled. The part was hardly worth doing at all. I sent it back to the producer, telling him what I thought of it. A couple of days later he phoned me. ‘No, no – you’re not the lover, I want you to read the part of the father!’ I put the phone down and stood there, shocked. The father? Me?” he recalled.
That was the moment it hit him: “The only girl I’d ever get to kiss in a film again would be my daughter.”
With that realisation came an existential crisis, one that pushed him to accept a role he would later regret: the villain in On Deadly Ground (1994), a Steven Seagal action vehicle set to shoot in Alaska.
With the storm cloud of career anxiety hanging overhead, Caine jumped at the offer. As he admitted later, he never truly wanted to make the film. But he took it anyway, desperate to keep working.
Once he arrived on set in Alaska, however, reality set in quickly. The cold was biting, the role uninspired, and the decision – clearly – ill-advised.
“Although Steven and the rest of the team were great to work with, I had broken one of the cardinal rules of bad movies: if you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location,” he later joked.
Caine remained professional on set. Unlike many actors who’ve worked with Seagal, he didn’t report any friction or bizarre behaviour. In fact, he barely saw the action star at all. “He rarely emerged from his motorhome between takes,” Caine told Rolling Stone. “It wasn’t one of my dream experiences, to put it nicely.”
Back in the Daily Mail interview, he was even blunter: “Here I was, doing a movie where the work was freezing my brain, and the weather was freezing my ass. I vowed never to work in a tough location again.”
That vow would lead to a new rule in Caine’s career. From that point on, he decided that if his wife, Shakira, wasn’t willing to travel with him to a film’s location, it wasn’t worth the trouble.
“I remember asking her if she would like to come to Alaska”, he said, chuckling. “And she didn’t even bother to reply. I should have got the warning.”