It’s been 13 years since Jack Nicholson appeared in a film, the last time being James L. Brooks’ “How Do You Know,” a romcom starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson. In 2017, he was also rumored to star in a remake of the German comedy “Toni Erdmann, he dropped out of the role a year later.
Nicholson never actually announced his retirement, but he’s now 86 years old and the chances of ever seeing him again on screen seem slim to none.
During an interview in the “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast, record producer, and longtime Nicholson friend, Lou Adler shared a recent chat he had with Nicholson. It turns out that Nicholson is still refusing movie offers.
A friend of mine wanted to put him in a movie. Jack said, ‘I don’t want to do it. You know what I did today? I sat under a tree and I read a book.’ […] He’s doing whatever he really wants to do. He wants to be quiet. He wants to eat what he wants. He wants to live the life he wants.
In a September 2013 Vanity Fair article, Nicholson stated that he did not consider himself retired, merely that he was now less driven to “be out there anymore”. He did make a special appearance in 2015 as a presenter on SNL 40, the 40th anniversary special of Saturday Night Live.
In 2017, The New York Post's Page Six had Nicholson's great pal, the late great Peter Fonda, quoted as saying: “I think he is basically retired. I don’t want to speak for him, but he has done a lot of work and he has done very well as a person financially. Sometimes people have a reason that you don’t know, and it’s not for me to ask. I don’t call him up and say, ‘Johnny,’ I call him Johnny Hop, ‘What are you doing?’ I would say, ‘How are you, how do you feel?’”
Nicholson is a national treasure, right up there in the pantheon of the great post-60s American actors, definitely alongside Pacino, De Niro and Hackman. His charismatic, loose style of acting is one for the ages — the sardonic drifter, the eternal outsider, a man that always rebelled against a societal structure.
What’s your favorite performance of his?
There are too many to choose from. Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, The Last Detail, The Passenger, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, The Shining, Terms of Endearment, Prizzi’s Honor, Broadcast News, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good As it Gets, The Pledge, About Schmidt, The Departed … Legend.
While James L. Brooks teased last year that "we'll soon be seeing" Jack Nicholson, 89, act again, and that he was "reading scripts," that idea has now been shut down by his close friend Michael Douglas, 82.