‘I’m more or less done with movies:’ Michael Caine

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This article was published 19/10/2021 (1768 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Michael Caine is causing confusion about whether he’ll continue acting or not.

The 88-year-old actor told a BBC Radio program Friday that his latest film Best Sellers (streaming on demand) would be his last. He again insinuated that he’s stepping away from acting in an interview published by The Guardian Monday.

However, Caine clarified that he hasn’t retired in a short tweet over the weekend. “I haven’t retired and not a lot of people know that,” he wrote Saturday.

He added in a statement to Variety: “Regarding retirement, I’ve spent over 50 years getting up at 6 a.m. to make movies, and I’m not getting rid of my alarm clock!”

When speaking on Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review Friday, Caine said his role as cranky author Harris Shaw in Best Sellers has “turned out to be” his “last part.”

“I haven’t worked for two years, and I have a spine problem, which affects my legs. So, I can’t walk very well,” Caine explained. “And I also wrote a book, a couple of books, which were published and were successful. So, I’m now not an actor, I’m a writer.”

The Going In Style star shared a similar sentiment with The Guardian where he laughed at the idea of playing a character that had to run away from a bunch of crooks.

“I can’t walk, let alone run,” he told the outlet. “And I’m more or less done with movies now.”

The Academy Award-winning actor has dozens of movie credits spanning six decades: “I’ve done 150 movies. I think I’ve done enough.”

Caine also admitted that while he is doing “well,” his mind is not as sharp as it used to be. When asked if his character in Best Seller was based on an old director he once worked with, Caine insisted he couldn’t remember and that his “mind’s not as agile as it used to be.”

“I can’t walk and I can’t stand for very long and now I don’t know whether my bloody memory’s going,” he told The Guardian.

Still, he said he used time during the pandemic to write a novel, his first try at fiction after several memoirs, and hopes to get it published next year.

“The title is If You Don’t Want to Die. I only read thrillers. I’m an adventure man, I’m not a literature person, so I’m not trying to replace Shakespeare here. But it’s based on something I once read about two dustmen, two rubbish collectors in the East End,” Caine said. “And they find uranium in the rubbish.”

— USA Today