Actor Michael Douglas: ‘What roles haven’t I done?’

The Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel has been a Tinseltown fixture since its doors opened in 1941, so is an appropriate place for lunch with Michael Douglas. A two-time Oscar-winner, he has his own decades of history in Hollywood, as did his late father Kirk, who had a favourite table. From Marlene Dietrich and Charlie Chaplin to Steven Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio, the A-list has dined here. Dean Martin celebrated his 49th birthday at the lounge, when an art collector was left with a fractured skull after a brawl involving Frank Sinatra, and studio bosses down the decades have sat in its booths to see, be seen and do deals.

Douglas is waiting at a booth in the bar, smart in a dark jacket (the dress code prohibits ripped denim or crop tops) and a crisp pink shirt. Robbie Williams is at the next booth, playing with his phone and looking as if he just got out of bed, which he might well have done: it is barely noon on Sunday, which explains the three-course “prix-fixe” brunch, priced at a mere $155 per person. 

My mind immediately turns to the FT’s expenses department. “Oh my God,” says Douglas, who has also noticed the price. He has chosen today’s restaurant and says he’s sure that Apple TV+, which is screening Franklin, his new mini-series about Benjamin Franklin, will pick up the tab. But Lunch with the FT rules are clear: the FT pays. “In that case, Matthew,” he says, chuckling, “thank you so much for picking this restaurant.” The prix-fixe includes a drink, so I say a silent prayer to the expenses gods and order a Bloody Mary. 

A period drama about a US founding father is not exactly in keeping with Douglas’s best-known roles: Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, the philandering Dan Gallagher coming home for boiled-bunny surprise in Fatal Attraction, or Basic Instinct, where he sparred with a smouldering Sharon Stone. Most of his films have been of the moment and zeitgeist. 

“These last few years have really been about: what haven’t I done?” he says. He did the “green screen thing” with the Ant-Man films for Marvel, a Netflix comedy series — The Kominsky Method — with the late Alan Arkin, and now a full-blown period piece, with tights, wigs and a largely French cast.

Franklin centres on the title character’s mission to France in 1776 to secure military support for America’s war against Britain. Douglas, who has also ordered a Bloody Mary, is unstinting in his admiration. “The guy only had two formal years of schooling. He left at 12 and his father was a candlemaker. He was this voracious reader, a great writer, thinker, publisher and printer. He seemed to have this ability to tie systems together. He was like a magician.” 

He reels off some of Franklin’s other accomplishments, in a voice scratchier since his oral cancer a decade ago. Franklin created the University of Pennsylvania, became postmaster general and started the Philadelphia library. A renowned scientist, he also invented bifocals and the lightning rod, and charted the Gulf Stream weather system. Oh, and his face is on the $100 bill. “A true renaissance man,” Douglas says. 

It is certainly an age-appropriate role for Douglas, given that he turns 80 this year. Franklin was 70 in 1776 but relatively ancient for a time when people didn’t live much beyond their forties. “He makes Joe Biden look like a kid.”

Unlike his French contemporaries, Franklin didn’t wear a wig, which means Douglas was spared time in the make-up chair and gets to show off his still impressive mane of hair. “Jack Nicholson always accuses me of being a hair actor. I find a lot of my character through hair.” He has a point: his extreme slicked-back style helped define Gekko in Wall Street, as did the tightly wound antihero’s crew cut in Falling Down. And there were few more impressive 1980s mullets than the one he sported in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain.

The drinks arrive, each elaborately garnished with a big piece of celery and a couple of huge olives. “There’s a salad in it,” Douglas points out, and we clink glasses. 

Franklin focuses on the struggle to establish and protect American democracy and is being released in an election year when many have argued that the country’s foundational principle is under threat. Making the series helped “me understand how precious democracy is”, says Douglas, in a nod to Donald Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric. “How it has to not be taken for granted.

“One of our candidates is leaning towards putting together his own team — and that doesn’t mean just in the executive branch [of government]. That means the judicial branch, the congressional branch . . . anyone that’s not on his team is his enemy.”

A waiter delivers our starters — Dungeness Crab Louie for Douglas (a West Coast invention, essentially crab salad with asparagus and avocado), and tuna tartare for me. As we begin, I ask Douglas about his relationship with his late father. I expect to hear that he was in the Polo Lounge a lot growing up, but he actually spent his childhood in New York because Kirk and his mother, Diana, divorced when he was young. A Hollywood career was not immediately on his agenda, he says. “Probably just inherent hostility. Separated parents and all that.”

I run into these drunken idiots and they say, ‘Hey, you’re the man! Gordon Gekko is why I came to Wall Street!’ . . . I always say, ‘No! I was the villain, remember?’

Something changed, though, and Douglas started acting, first on stage and then the small screen, where he made four series of The Streets of San Francisco, opposite Karl Malden, in the mid-1970s. In total, it was 104 hours of television and taught him about the three-act story structure, among other things. “I’m probably not the best person for certain types of films because I’m an old-fashioned structuralist.” No freeform art-house movies for him, then. “There’s a difference between a good idea and an actual three-act piece.”

He also took an early interest in producing and persuaded his father to let him develop Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “It was right after Spartacus in the ’60s. He acquired the book in galley form, had a play made out of it. But it wasn’t a success.”

The younger Douglas had read the book in college. “It was a 20th-century American classic and I loved it. I was a hippy and it was a psychedelic thing, all of that. Dad tried to turn the book into a movie and he couldn’t do it.” 

Kirk was angling to play the RP McMurphy role that was eventually taken by Jack Nicholson. “[Dad] always accused me of not wanting him in the picture. Anyway, I gave him half of my producing deal and I always teased him because he made more money off that film than any picture he’d ever done. Thank God he always was the first to acknowledge what a great job Jack did.”

The film was also a major critical success, winning five Oscars at the 1976 Academy Awards, becoming the first to garner a clean sweep of the best picture, actor, actress, director and screenplay prizes since It Happened One Night in 1934. In a landmark year for cinema, the movie beat Barry Lyndon, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon and Nashville to best picture and Douglas picked up his statuette from Audrey Hepburn. He was just 31. 

He has since produced 30 films. “I love producing, I really do. First of all, I don’t [have to] deal with the anxiety of acting.” He admits to suffering from stage fright early in his career and says the longer his career has gone on, the more he has realised “how seldom it is you get a really good part”. 

He had, in his father, a role model for how to navigate the vagaries of Hollywood stardom and celebrity. But it took him several years to find his own way. Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, for which he won his second Oscar, “were really where my life as an actor changed, where I finally stepped out from my father’s shadow with my own identity”. 

I wonder if he knew the Gekko character would become as emblematic of the period as he did. Most people he has encountered since then misunderstood the film’s message, he says. “I run into these drunken idiots and they say, ‘Hey, you’re the man! Gordon Gekko is why I came to Wall Street!’ They loved him because he dressed so well. I always say, ‘No! I was the villain, remember?’”

Our main courses and another round of Bloody Marys are promptly served. Douglas is having huevos rancheros; I’ve chosen a McCarthy salad at his recommendation, which consists of chicken, bacon, avocado, hard-boiled egg and beets. It has been on the menu here since the 1940s. “It’s a famous one,” he says, adding that it was named after a polo-playing regular — not Joseph McCarthy, who led the anti-communist crusade in the 1950s and blacklisted dozens of suspected communist sympathisers in Hollywood.

I ask about Douglas’s relationship with Judaism. His father was the child of immigrants from Belarus; born Issur Danielovitch, Kirk reconnected with his religion later in life, studying the Torah and writing several books about his faith after surviving a helicopter crash. Is the younger Douglas particularly religious? “I’m not, but I’m proud to be a member of the tribe. My mother was Episcopalian and as I grew up, I wasn’t considered a Jew. And yet I remember at an early age being very aware of a lot of antisemitism. It really wasn’t until the Reform Movement came in and said, ‘If your father’s Jewish, yes, you can be a Jew.’ Which is still not accepted by the Orthodox part.”

His own children from his marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones have also embraced Judaism. “My son wanted a bar mitzvah, my daughter had a bat mitzvah. They did all the work, all the studying. I’ve got some wonderful pictures.”

The attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli campaign in Gaza have been sharply felt by Hollywood’s Jewish community. “It’s an impossible situation,” Douglas says. “It’d be one thing if Israel had a popular prime minister. Maintaining this conflict might save him a trial.

“My whole take is, I was shocked by how quickly the pro-Palestinian movement happened after October 7. They were still looking for body parts in Israel and yet there was this big outpouring of support.”

He has a strong connection to Israel and in 2015 was awarded the Genesis Prize, which celebrates Jewish achievement and aims to strengthen bonds between Israel and diaspora Jews. His father, meanwhile, was among the country’s earliest supporters and blazed a trail in other areas, helping end the Hollywood blacklist when he hired Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus. “He stepped up,” Douglas says.

I wonder if the relationship with Kirk changed over the years, after the distance between the two in his childhood. Kirk was “very, very busy [when I was] growing up. Then, as his career changed or waned a bit, he managed to have more time. We became closer.

Is there much discussion in the UK about rejoining the EU? . . . The country got sold a bill of goods, man

“I think he was terrified when I said I was going to be an actor. He said, ‘Michael, if I knew you were going to be successful I would have been much nicer to you.’”

Douglas and Zeta-Jones live in Santa Barbara. “I can’t face East Coast winters any more.” What about Welsh winters? “Well, it’s rain, isn’t it?” He takes a keen interest in what happens across the pond, though, and occasionally spends time near Swansea, where Zeta-Jones’s family hails from. 

Then he says, unprompted: “Is there much discussion in the UK, or any discussion, about rejoining the EU?”

Er, not much, I say. It’s not really something politicians from any party want to talk about. “I remember going back one time, man [before the referendum], and being in Swansea. It was rocking and there was all this EU money being spent there.” 

Leaving was “terrible” for the UK. “The country got sold a bill of goods, man. They don’t do this much in the UK, in the news, but they should take the old political speeches that were made [before the vote] . . . they should remind people of what they were promised.” 

Neither of us can finish our gigantic main course, and while the plates are cleared the conversation turns to the future of an industry he has worked in for more than 50 years. 

As a TV actor he struggled to land film parts, despite having won a best picture Oscar, because the small screen was seen as of lower value. But television has risen in prominence over the past two decades, thanks to channels such as HBO (for which Douglas starred in the acclaimed 2013 Liberace film Behind the Candelabra, directed by Steven Soderbergh). Since then, “most of the change has been with streaming. I have this show for Apple, you’ve got Warner Brothers with about $40bn in debt, while Apple is sitting on, what, $400bn in cash?” It’s more like $165bn but you get the picture: Apple has so much more spending power than Hollywood. “There’s a disparity there.”

Given that it was produced for Apple, was making Franklin a different experience from what he is used to? “I had no complaints.” So Apple chief executive Tim Cook wasn’t on set, offering notes? He mentions Richard Plepler, who produced the series, and who used to run HBO. “I’m sure it helped having him there, with his history.”

We’re too full for dessert, so the cheesecake I ordered as part of the set menu and Douglas’s apple pie sundae are brought out for us to take away in dainty cardboard boxes. Before we leave, Douglas wants to show me a video on his phone of a U2 concert at the Sphere in Las Vegas, a new immersive venue that gives the audience the impression of being somewhere else. “It looks like you’re outside but you’re actually inside,” he says. He points out Zeta-Jones dancing. A bearded man in the row in front of Douglas and Zeta-Jones turns around. “Hey, that’s Pierce Brosnan,” he says.

Is this where movies are going — fully immersive experiences? Douglas mentions the evolution of home theatres with bigger screens and surround sound. “It’s expensive to go to the movies,” he says, admitting that he worries about the industry’s future. Then the Hollywood lifer who forged his own path brightens. “But there’s always going to be entertainment, right?”

Matthew Garrahan is the FT’s head of digital platforms

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