That's a career-wrap on Michael Douglas
Michael Douglas has hung up his bifocals and dashed any hopes fans had for a sequel to hisBenjamin Franklin series.Speaking at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) in the Czech Republic yesterday, per The Hollywood Reporter, and following nearly 60 years on screen, the 80-year-old Oscar winner announced that he has “no intention” of working again, saying he’d rather hang out with his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, which, yeah, makes sense. It was a long time coming. Douglas says that he hasn’t worked since 2022 when he realized “I have to stop,” and indeed he has. Throughout his career, Douglas rarely went a year without a new release, and in the last two decades, he also survived throat cancer, a Wall Street sequel, and the ups and downs of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In that time, in addition to an Emmy-winning performance in Behind The Candelabra, he also enjoyed runs on the Netflix hit The Kominsky Method and a Green Eggs And Ham show that we’re all just finding out about. Sadly, that’s a wrap on Michael Douglas, who, weirdly, “did not want to be one of those people who dropped dead on set.” Though he stops short of saying he’s retired “because [if] something special came up, I’d go back,” he reiterates, “I have no real intention” of doing so.
In the meantime, he’s “happy to play the wife,” which we’ll take in the good spirit of his sentiments and not as a weirdly regressive way of looking at his marriage with Zeta-Jones, who he admits is “25 years younger than” he and “very busy right now.”
Douglas’ IMDb page lists a couple more projects in the pipeline, including a drama called Looking Through Water, which is reportedly scheduled for release this summer, and the long-in-development Reagan & Gorbachev mini-series, co-starring Christoph Waltz, for Paramount+. Selfishly, we implore Douglas to reconsider his retirement until after his dramatic retelling of the Reykjavík Summit. Still, we understand if he’d rather play Catherine Zeta-Jones’ wife until something really good comes along.
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