Michael Caine is 88 and walks with a stick. He has a gammy leg and a dodgy spine and reckons the only time he leaves the house these days is when his wife has the time to take him out for a drive. The other week he was sent a screenplay that had his character running away from a bunch of crooks, and this made him laugh – the very idea he could play it. “I can’t walk, let alone run,” he says. “And I’m more or less done with movies now.”
He was winding down anyway, hadn’t shot a film in a year, and then sneaked in one last movie, Best Sellers, just before the pandemic struck. He doubts he will ever make another, which is fine by him, no great loss. He’s got his knighthood and his Oscars; what does he have left to prove? He says: “I’ve done 150 movies. I think I’ve done enough.”
Caine has been such a reliable fixture for so long – part of the furniture, a familiar face on the screen – that it’s unnerving to imagine the landscape without him, like walking into the Tower of London and finding the ravens all gone. It’s more unnerving still to realise that it may already have happened; that he might have retired without anyone making a fuss. Caine spent the first part of his career storming the barricades and the second enjoying the spoils of his success. One would have expected some big final act, a showstopping swan song. Instead, we have this: a clean getaway.
The actor is speaking via video link from his Surrey home near Box Hill (the first time, he says, he has done an interview this way). He’s supposed to be promoting his role in Best Sellers, an amiable enough enterprise that casts him as a dyspeptic old author who becomes a viral sensation. But the man’s not feeling it; he seems to have moved on. When I tell him I’ve heard he based the character of Harris Shaw on a monstrous old director he once worked with, he pleads total ignorance and says he can’t think who I mean. “I don’t remember. I might have done. It’s been two years since I did it, so it’s funny talking about it now.” He slurps his tea. “Also, I’m 88. My mind’s not as agile as it used to be.”
