Michael Douglas says director of Oscar-winning film told him he wasn't good enough: 'There was a knock on the door'

Michael Douglas revealed at the recent edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival in New York that director Oliver Stone was initially so disappointed with his acting for the 1987 feature film “Wall Street” that he asked him an unlikely question during filming, reports Variety magazine.

“Okay, we were at the end of the second week of shooting and there was a knock on the door. 'Hey, Mike, it's Oliver. Can I come in?'” Douglas recounted, quoted by Entertainment Weekly. “I say, 'Yeah, come in.' He gets in the trailer and sits down. He says, 'Are you okay?' I say: “Yes, I'm fine”. [El spune]: “Do you do drugs?” I told him: “No, I don't do drugs”. And he said: “Because you look like you've never acted in your life”, revealed Michael Douglas, now 81 years old.

The actor said he told Stone he didn't watch the dailies to check his performance, “because I'm the kind of guy who always sees what's wrong or what's not going to make it into the movie…so I don't look at the dailies. So I said, 'I think I'd better take a look,' and he said, 'Yeah, you better watch.'”

“And then I looked at them very carefully, very critically, and they looked pretty good,” Douglas continued, referring to when filming resumed. “So I kept saying, 'I think it's pretty good.'”

The movie “Wall Street” brought Michael Douglas his only Oscar as an actor

Stone eventually came to terms with his star, who played the iconic role of Gordon Gekko alongside Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah in “Wall Street.” The film revolves around the relationship between the young broker played by Sheen and the rich corporate predator played by Douglas.

“[Stone] he was willing to make me hate him with all my heart throughout this movie to get that little extra push,” Douglas said of the director's initial insults, adding that he didn't take them personally. “His track record with actors is really impressive. So I'm deeply, deeply grateful that he gave me the role and pushed me to another level,” Michael Douglas emphasized.

He would go on to win the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance in “Wall Street.”

Despite his illustrious career that spanned several decades, his performance in the film directed by Oliver Stone was the only one for which Douglas was awarded an Oscar as an actor. He was awarded an Oscar back in 1976 for the film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”, but the award was thanks to his role as a producer of the feature film. Incidentally, he didn't even star in this film, which won Jack Nicholson the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

The legendary actor announced his retirement last year

Michael Douglas returned as Gordon Gekko in Stone's 2010 sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Speaking at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last year, Michael Douglas revealed that he had been on a self-imposed hiatus from acting for several years and had no real plans to ever act in a film again.

“I worked pretty hard for almost 60 years and I didn't want to be one of those people who dropped dead on the set,” he said, among other things. However, Douglas refused to categorically state that he had “retired”, stating that he would “come back” if “something special came up”.

“Other than that, I'm pretty happy. I just like watching my wife work,” he added, referring to Catherine Zeta-Jones, the Oscar-winning actress he's been married to since 2000. Zeta-Jones has also cut back on her roles in recent years, but accepted director Tim Burton's offer to play Morticia Addams in Netflix's “Wednesday.”