John Turturro has worked with some of cinema’s finest, but there’s one collaboration that slipped through his fingers — a role personally written for him by the legendary Stanley Kubrick.
Speaking on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Emmy-winning actor revealed that Kubrick had reached out to him while preparing for Eyes Wide Shut, the 1999 erotic drama that would become the director’s final film. “I didn’t turn down Stanley Kubrick, but Stanley Kubrick called me up for Eyes Wide Shut, and I was, like, shocked that he knew all about me,” Turturro recalled.
At the time, the actor had just wrapped The Truce (1997), in which he played Holocaust survivor Primo Levi after years of research and preparation. Kubrick, impressed by his work, told him, “I think you’re a terrific actor.” Turturro, amused, admitted, “I was like, ‘Well, I can’t walk around my house saying that to my wife; she’ll hit me over the head with a frying pan.’”
According to Turturro, Kubrick mentioned he had written a role specifically for him — the part of pianist Nick Nightingale, ultimately played by Todd Field. “He said, ‘I wrote this part for you.’ I didn’t say to him, ‘Whatever it is, I will do.’ But I was so excited. I said, ‘I’ll read it, and we’ll work it out.’ I was talking to him like a normal person,” the Severance star explained.
The actor later realised that his enthusiasm may not have come across strongly enough. “The next day, I heard I was unavailable, because I didn’t tell him, ‘No matter what.’ That’s it, and I didn’t know that at the time. I just tried to be a regular [person],” he admitted.
Turturro still wonders what it would have been like to be on Kubrick’s famously demanding sets. “I would have liked to have worked with him just because I’m a big fan of his and see how I would have survived doing long takes,” he said.
Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, went on to endure a record-breaking 400-day shoot, with Kubrick overseeing endless retakes and rewrites. The director died in 1999, shortly after presenting his final cut to Warner Bros., never witnessing the film’s release.