THE HOLY GRAIL
In 2006, Empire got a rare chance to speak to a retired Sean Connery. Chris Hewitt remembers what it was like to go toe-to-toe with a no-nonsense legend
If I’d written a bucket list when I first joined Empire back in 2001, one of the things I would have scrawled near the very top would have been: “Interview Sean Connery”. After all, he was one of the greats. The first Bond. A fellow Celt (even if I’d ignorantly pronounced his name as “seen”’ until I was about ten). My party piece was being able to say every single line of dialogue of his from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, in a fair approximation of that usually unfairly approximated burr. I never was very popular at parties.
And then Big Tam up and retired after the horror show of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the lucky bastard; the rest of us had to plough on with our lives), and that was that.
Until, one day in the summer of 2006, I received an email from a PR representing the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It contained the sentence, “Would you be interested in interviewing Sean Connery?” It turned out that, even in retirement, Connery was, as an Edinburgh boy born and bred, keeping his hand in as patron of his home city’s film festival, and with the 60th anniversary on the horizon he was up for spreading the good word.
So, a few days later I squeezed into a tiny room just off the Empire office armed with an A4 sheet of questions, a Dictaphone, and a stomach full of butterflies. After all, he was famously a recalcitrant, even irritable, interviewee. A man whose reputation preceded him. No sufferer of fools, he. Hence the list of questions, in case I lost the run of myself, or forgot my own name.
I needn’t have worried. From the second the phone was picked up in the Bahamas and I heard that unmistakable voice, the nerves disappeared. Connery was in a good mood. It perhaps helped that I didn’t treat the interview as a chance to talk about his glorious career. Twenty minutes wasn’t nearly enough for a deep dive.
Instead, as he was promoting the Edinburgh Film Festival, I decided to focus on his connection to the Scottish capital. Detecting a Northern Irish accent, Connery asked where I was from, which led to a conversation about our mutual backgrounds. And, as Connery laughed and chuckled, we talked. About the Edinburgh Film Festival, of course. About why he became an actor. About his recent decision to scrap his autobiography (“I discovered there were ten books about me and that I was going to have to spend the rest of my life trying to correct ten books of inaccuracies”). About his employment status: “You might say I’m retired.”
The things we didn’t talk about: Bond, Last Crusade, Sidney Lumet, The Untouchables. But it’s okay, because I had a masterplan: to use this interview to win him over, and set up a longer second interview. And it seemed to be working.
And so, as our time ticked away, I sprang the trap. “Sean, I’ve got to let you go,” I said. “But I’ve
had a great time talking to you, and obviously there’s so much that we haven’t even touched upon. I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to agree to a longer interview, where we can really dig into your incredible career?”
And I waited, hopefully, for my new chum, my Celtic cousin, Sean ‘Big Tam’ Connery to respond with a gushing “Yes! We’re not so different, you and I. Tell you what, come out to the house in the Bahamas. We’ll play some golf and then you can ask me whatever you want.”
Instead, there was a short pause, and then Sean Connery said, “Eh... I don’t think so.”
And that was that. At the time, I was deeply disappointed. Crushed, even. But as the years have passed, I’m grateful for the experience. Not only was I one of the last journalists in the world to speak to Connery for any length of time, but it’s given me a story I can now trot out at parties, instead of reciting lines from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Which is a much more popular option. Thanks, Sean.