David Bowie pulled down the curtain on touring in 2004, bringing one chapter of his illustrious career to an end, but he wasn’t quite done with the big screen. In 2006, it had been a few years since his major role, and that had come in the low-profile Canadian film Mr Rice’s Secret. No, us neither. It seemed that apart from a cameo here and there, Bowie was happy to leave his acting career behind too, but then Christopher Nolan came calling. Bowie said no. And then Christopher Nolan came calling again.
The future Oppenheimer director and Oscar winner was coming off the back of a successful reboot of the Batman franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins and he’d brought two of the cast with him in Christian Bale and Michael Caine for his next project, a twisty-turny tale of the battle between two magicians in Victorian London titled The Prestige. But he had hit a bump in the road when it came to casting the real-life figure of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American engineer and inventor. Who could portray this otherworldly, ahead-of-his-time figure, Nolan fretted? And then he hit upon a solution, recalling it to Entertainment Weekly in a tribute to Bowie after his death in 2016.
“At some point it occurred to me that Tesla was the original Man Who Fell To Earth,” Nolan opined. “As someone who was the biggest Bowie fan in the world, once I made that connection, he seemed to be the only actor capable of playing the part. He had that requisite iconic status, and he was a figure as mysterious as Tesla needed to be.”
But Bowie wasn’t as immediately convinced as his director, Nolan recalled, saying it was the only time he’d ever gone back to an actor who had already turned him down. “I petitioned to let me explain why he was the right actor for it,” he said. “In total honesty, I told him if he didn’t agree to do the part, I had no idea where I would go from there. I would say I begged him.”
It paid off – The Prestige is a brilliant film, and Bowie’s brief presence adds something to its odd, suspenseful alchemy. Nolan said his aura brought something different to the set. “He had a level of charisma beyond what you normally experience, and everyone really responded to it,” he stated. “I’ve never seen a crew respond to any movie star that way, no matter how big. But he was very gracious and understood the effect he had on people. Everyone has fond memories of getting to spend time with him or speak to him for a little bit. I only worked with him briefly—four or five days—but I did manage to sneak a couple moments to chat with him, which are very treasured memories of mine.”
It would not be Bowie’s last role in a film, with an appearance coming in the Josh Hartnett-starring August in 2008, but it is one of the finest of his later-year parts, and certainly up there with his very different cameo in Extras, which you can read about here.
Watch Bowie’s Tesla in The Prestige below:
