Michael Douglas revealed at the recent TCM Classic Film Festival in New York City that director Oliver Stone originally disliked his acting in 1987’s “Wall Street” so much that he asked Douglas if he was taking drugs during production.
“Okay, so we were finishing the second week of filming, and there was a knock on my door. ‘Hey Mike, it’s s Oliver. Can I come in?’” Douglas remembered (via EW). “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 says], ‘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.’”
Douglas informed Stone that he wasn’t watching the film’s dailies to check on his performance “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. So I said, ‘I guess I’d better take a look,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you better.’”
“And then I’m looking at them really hard, and critically, and they seemed pretty good,” Douglas continued about when filming resumed. “So I keep saying, ‘I think it’s pretty good.’”
Stone eventually came around and agreed with his star, who played the iconic role of Gordon Gekko opposite Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah in “Wall Street.” The film centers on the relationship between Sheen’s young stockbroker and Douglas’ wealthy corporate raider.
“He was willing for me to hate his guts for the rest of this movie to get that extra little push,” Douglas said of Stone’s original insults, which he did not take personally. “His record of successes with actors is quite impressive. So I’m deeply, deeply appreciative of the fact that it gave me part and the fact that he pushed me to another level.”
Douglas ended up winning the Oscar for best actor thanks to his performance in “Wall Street.” He was also awarded a Golden Globe and the National Board of Review’s best actor prize. He returned as Gordon Gekko in Stone’s 2010 sequel “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”
In Matt Zoller Seitz’s “The Oliver Stone Experience,” Stone had this to say about Douglas: “I think he was more comfortable [playing a villain], but I think Michael struggles for comfort levels. I mean, he’s not comfortable, per se; he’s always looking. If you notice, he moves his shoulders a lot. When he’s misused, which he sometimes is in films, that cockiness of Gekko can be irritating, smarmy, in the wrong roles. But I like Michael when he’s doing it in good movies, with good material. I liked him in ‘Wall Street’ very much.”