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Over the course of his decades-long career, Michael Caine has starred in a multitude of movies. Now 90 years old, the British actor revealed he’s considering retiring — “sort of.”
The Dark Knight star told The Telegraph that his upcoming film The Great Escaper — in which he stars as real-life World War II veteran named Bernard “Bernie” Jordan of the Royal Navy — may be his final film. While Caine has previously thought about retirement, he noted that prior instances were different because he “wasn’t 90 then.”
“I am bloody 90 now, and I can’t walk properly and all that,” he said. “I sort of am retired now.”
While he acknowledged the pros to old age — “nobody expects you to do very much and people do things for you” — he also admitted that there are cons, particularly that “so much disappears from your life.”
“You can’t run around, you can’t play football, and you gradually realize you’re approaching death,” he added.
“Everybody’s going to die,” he continued. “At least I’ve lived to f***ing 90.”
Nonetheless, Caine told the outlet he was “so happy” to star in The Great Escaper.
“I just loved the character of Bernie,” he shared. “I thought he was incredible, and it’s so beautifully written. With Covid and all that, I hadn’t done a picture for three years, and I thought I was finished. And I suddenly did it – and had such a wonderful time.”
In 2021, he denied rumors of his retirement, despite telling host Simon Mayo of the BBC radio show Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review that his role in Best Sellers was his “last part.” Caine posted the following on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) the next day: “I haven’t retired and not a lot of people know that.”
Outside of acting, Caine has kept himself busy writing, noting that ” it’s something [he] can do without walking.”
“All you need is a chair and a pencil and paper,” he noted.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Caine has published six books, three of which are autobiographies. He also is releasing a new thriller novel entitled Deadly Game on Dec. 5.
In Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life, his 2018 memoir that he published at age 85, Caine credited Jack Nicholson for convincing him not to retire from acting in the 90s, revealing that Nicholson had “brought [him] a script for a movie called Blood and Wine and talked [him] into coming out of [his] so-called retirement and going back to work.”
“I did, and the truth was revealed to me — or I allowed myself to see it: However happy I kidded myself I was, I was never going to be happier than when I was acting,” he wrote.
The Great Escaper hits theaters in the UK on Oct. 6. Watch the trailer above.
