Michael Douglas used his Lifetime Achievement victory lap to admit something most A-listers never say out loud: trying to be the actor and the producer at the same time ate up two decades of his life he wishes he’d handled differently.
The moment
The 81-year-old Ant-Man star was in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in December 2024 for the Red Sea International Film Festival, where he was honored with the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Before accepting it, the two-time Oscar winner sat down for a career chat and got candid about the stretch when his producing ambitions started calling the shots. He told the crowd (via Far Out Magazine) that once he built a production company and began financing his own films, the producing side took over and bled into everything else.
"Careful what you wish for. I had a big production company. I financed my own movies," he said. "The producing aspect of my life sort of took over, and I would find myself in movies I was producing, and that is not a good combination." After acting, he would go home to sift through scripts and give notes: "So, the job became overwhelming. There were about 20 years in there which I could have simplified and probably enjoyed life more."
That tracks. It sounds glamorous, but the way he describes it, juggling both jobs meant doing the day’s scenes and then spending nights triaging development notes. Not exactly a stress-free run.
Why it adds up
Douglas isn’t just an actor who dabbled in producing; he’s been deep in it since the mid-70s, kicking off with the Jack Nicholson classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. From there, he toggled between leading roles and shepherding projects, sometimes doing both at once.
- Produced and starred: The China Syndrome, Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile, The Sentinel.
- Produced only: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Starman; Double Impact; Made in America; Flatliners (both the 1990 original and the 2017 remake).
- On TV: Ratched, Franklin, The Kominsky Method.
Zoom out, and you can see how the producing gig could snowball. He wasn’t just attaching his name; he was building and running projects across film and TV, sometimes while headlining them. No surprise he looks back and thinks: maybe less would have been more.