Michael Douglas: ‘I haven’t read the small print but if they decide to end it, I want a big death’

They make those Douglases tough. I last saw Michael of that clan in Cannes a decade ago. It was three years since he had been diagnosed with an advanced cancer and, though lively and combative, he still seemed frail round the edges. A few of us wondered if he might be thinking of retiring to a quiet retreat somewhere. That is not the family’s way. Kirk Douglas, his legendary father, had a debilitating stroke nearly a quarter of a century before his death in 2020. The former Issur Danielovitch was not to be inconvenienced by mere illness.

Michael, now 78 years old, has barely rested. He romanced Diane Keaton in And So it Goes. He played opposite Alan Arkin in three seasons of the comedy The Kominsky Method for Netflix. And, of course, he got inveigled into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They all do. From 2015, Douglas has played Hank Pym, scientist dad to Paul Rudd’s eponymous formic superhero, in Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp and, now, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Douglas is sitting beside the poster as the stars often do in such junkets. He points at the absurd title.

“I just realised this recently,” he says. “Look at the title – Quantumania. You can see ‘Ant-Man’ in the title. Very clever. There is some sort of subjective thinking there. I was a little slow. It took me a long time. It’s right there.”

I hadn’t noticed that, either. It is, indeed, right there.

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Anyway, Michael Douglas looks younger and zippier than he did a decade ago. He is crisp and amusing. He seems prepared to suffer us fools with reasonable gladness. It must require resilience to weather the rigours of the contemporary promotional machine in such spirits. I am not sure I can imagine Kirk Douglas doing the same.

Michael has been at this game for well over half a century. Greybeards will remember him on TV opposite Karl Malden – a mentor – in the Quinn Martin cop show The Streets of San Francisco. In 1976 he won his first Oscar (a trivia favourite, this) for producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Proper movie fame came in the 1980s with Wall Street and Fatal Attraction.

A lot has changed since then. A great deal more has changed since Kirk became a star in the years after the second World War.

“Just recently my father willed me all of his scripts,” he says. “He had all of the scripts for his 90-plus movies leather-bound. And in the scripts they had all his notes. Notes for each film. Which was just really enlightening. And I thought: I have all my leather-bound copies. They are empty of notes because we get so many pink and blue and green pages.”

[ Kirk Douglas: The curtain falls on one of Hollywood’s greatest ]

Douglas is referring to the industry’s habit of adding in scenes as the production progresses. The new pages are colour-coded.

“The whole script is now a rainbow of colours,” he continues. “I thought: how amazing. It seems like back then the scripts were much more locked before they even started shooting. Here were my father’s notes, which had not changed much from the first day he read the script to the shooting time. But I would say the biggest changes are digital over celluloid. Those lighter cameras opened us up.”

Kirk Douglas – largely because the war intervened – did not achieve superstardom until he was comfortably into his 30s. But he arrived in Hollywood when only slightly older colleagues could remember that place as a village in the desert. There was a sense that everybody knew everyone else and the rest of the world mattered only as a market. The older Douglas, 103 at his death, lived long enough to see the industry become a global concern with less of a geographical anchor. “Hollywood” now happens in Vancouver, London, Rome and New Zealand (home of the continuing Avatar Empire).

“In my father’s era it was a much tighter community in Los Angeles. In Hollywood,” Michael agrees. “Now people tend to spread out all over. In his time, the western was probably their version of the comic book pictures of today. That was their escape to another period and another time. And of course, they were much more active. My father usually made five movies a year. Now maybe people make one… or less. They’re into streaming.”

He can’t have seen the Marvel ascendancy coming as a kid. Hollywood did occasionally dip into that comic-book world – Richard Donner’s Superman in the 1970s, Tim Burton’s Batman in the late 1980s – but the notion of the industry relying on superheroes would have seemed absurd. Douglas remembers the 1960s equivalent.

“It wasn’t superheroes. It was Jules Verne’s, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which was a Disney picture that my father was in,” he says. “And it was an underwater super-advanced submarine that James Mason conducted. My father was part of the crew on it. I remember going down to watch. They had a giant squid. I remember visiting the set with this giant squid. That was the first time I realised how they were able to create that illusion. I never had any desire to produce those sort of pictures. I was immersed in contemporary times.”

Kirk did just one 20,000 Leagues movie. In 2023, a hit like that would be expanded into a franchise. It might even have facilitated an entire cosmos like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If Michael lives as long as his dad, he could be doing these films into the 2040s. Will he do another?

“I have not read the small print of my contract,” he says. “But if the schedule works out and it really makes sense I’m happy to do it. They’ve been a very nice group to work with. To me it’s a little bit of an escape, because it’s not contemporary. But if they decide to end it, I want a big death. Ha, ha!”

Douglas will know that he was born into advantage, but it can’t always have been easy being the son of an icon. Born to Russian immigrants who spoke Yiddish at home, Kirk had no such privilege and was, by all accounts, a tough taskmaster. His biography, The Ragman’s Son, featured robust explanation of its title. “Even on Eagle Street, in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman’s son,” he wrote.

[ Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – Welcome relief from Marvel at its most pompous ]

Kirk had success with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on stage, but, by the time he passed the rights to his son, he was too old to play the part that won Jack Nicholson an Oscar. That must have been tricky. Michael had his dust-ups in the years that followed – undergoing treatment for addiction in the early 1990s – but he eventually managed to capture an era of Hollywood for himself. Those performances in Wall Street (for which he won an Oscar), Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct embodied a strain of post-Reagan solipsism in a way no other actor managed.

In the new century, his marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones, a Welsh actor 25 years his junior, created some unkind gossip, but, despite the odd blip here and there, they have proved to be one of Hollywood’s most resilient couples.

“Family is family, you know,” he says, smiling. “You love them and then sometimes they make you crazy. But that is the emotional bond that human beings have. It makes us emotionally attached to people by blood or by being adopted. That makes you have the patience to put up with somebody else – even through the difficult times. It’s great. And then you have the joy of watching them change and grow.”

He is coming across like a sweet old geezer now. Who would have thought that when we were watching Wall Street?

“I’m enjoying it very much,” he says. “Catherine and I have our two kids – and there is my oldest son, Cameron, from a previous marriage. I just came from the wedding of a friend of mine’s son who I knew when they were just 10 years old. That is nice. Family brings us all closer together or…”

He smiles again to himself.

“…or it accentuates the differences, whichever it may be. But that’s a wonderful quality of being human.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is out now