(Credits: Far Out / United Artists)
Wed 25 March 2026 21:15, UK
The more famous an actor becomes, the thinner their skin seems to get, with Steve McQueen gaining notoriety in industry circles for being fiercely protective of his spot on the A-list.
After he’d broken through and become one of Hollywood’s biggest names, he was usually positioned as the focal point of any movie he appeared in. However, when he was forced to share the spotlight, things had a funny habit of devolving into petty posturing and pointless dick-measuring.
The Towering Inferno remains a shining beacon of fragile egos, with McQueen and Paul Newman making sure they earned the same amount of money, spoke the same number of lines, and were billed as the first name on the poster and in the marketing, depending on how you interpreted the alignment of their names.
Obviously, that wasn’t the first time the ‘King of Cool’ had tried to throw his weight around on set, and he made life more difficult for Yul Brynner than most. At the time the pair shared the screen in The Magnificent Seven, the latter was the bigger star, an Academy Award winner, and the first name in the credits.
That didn’t sit too well with McQueen, who went out of his way to sabotage Brynner at every turn. Knowing that his nemesis was the lead and he had minimal lines, the actor decided to draw attention to himself in other ways, drawing the audience’s attention to him even when he was in the background, whether it was fiddling with his hat, rattling shotgun shells, or flipping coins.
Since he was also a couple of inches shorter, Brynner devised the idea of building a little mound of dirt whenever his Chris Adams was standing next to McQueen’s Vin Tanner to make them appear equals in terms of height, only for the latter to devise the habit of kicking it right out from under him.
It was jealousy, pure and simple, with Marshall Terrill, who literally wrote the book on the Bullitt icon alongside his widow, Barbara Minty McQueen, admitting as much: “He felt that Brynner was a humourless egomaniac, and wanted to bring him down a notch while stealing the movie out from underneath him.”
He felt the easiest way to do that, without demanding sweeping rewrites to bump up his dialogue, which wouldn’t have happened anyway, since he wasn’t an established enough name yet to make those kinds of demands, was to make sure that even when Brynner was front and centre, all eyes remained fixed on him.
It worked, with The Magnificent Seven serving as the breakout role that saw McQueen leap from promising talent to full-fledged movie star, even if Brynner spent the rest of his life stewing at the blatant sabotage that was unfolding almost every day.
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