Credit: Far Out / United Artists
Fri 16 October 2026 21:45, UK
Some actors are better criers than others, and there are some, like Steve McQueen, who couldn’t cry at all. As a result, he missed out on what would have been the biggest hit of his entire career.
Shedding tears on command isn’t a necessity to reach the top in Hollywood, but it definitely helps. Take Claire Danes, for instance: she’s one of the best blubberers in the business, with four Golden Globes and three Primetime Emmys to her name, and all of those award-winning performances involve her crying face.
Admittedly, movie stars don’t need to start sobbing as much as their thespian counterparts, and a lot of it has to do with their fragile egos preventing them from playing characters who show their emotional side. Even if he wanted to, though, McQueen has no idea how to turn on the waterworks.
In general, he didn’t need to. He earned the nickname the ‘King of Cool’ because he was, in fact, about the coolest cat in cinema at his peak. He was the macho, man’s man embodiment of Americana, which meant that he never found himself drawn to roles that required him to cry anyway.
However, he was also honest, and when he was approached by Tinseltown’s newest wunderkind, Steven Spielberg, to play the leading role in his follow-up to Jaws, the highest-grossing release of all time that completely turned the industry upside down, he knew he was all wrong for Roy Neary.
“Steve said, ‘I love the script, but I can’t do your movie,’” Spielberg recalled. “And I said, ‘Why not?’ And he said, ‘Because the character at the end cries, and I’ve never cried in a movie before, and you’ve got to get an actor that will really cry, and not fake it with the glycerin in the eyes.’”
He could have, perhaps, figured out a way to make himself cry as and when the scene required, which is something that many performers learn at the very beginning of their careers to showcase their emotional range, but instead, since he couldn’t do it and didn’t want to try, he simply said no to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“I said, ‘I’ll cut it out!’” Spielberg went on. “‘I’ll cut out the scene where he’s crying’. And he said, ‘Nope. You’ve got to have the integrity to get an actor who will give you everything, and, emotionally, I don’t think I can get there.” With that, he was out of the running, but he wasn’t the only one who rejected the part.
Before Richard Dreyfuss headlined his second consecutive Spielbergian blockbuster, offers were made to Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and James Caan, all of whom followed McQueen’s lead and said no, although it wasn’t for the crying thing, because everyone’s seen them do it.
