Michael Caine says he’s retiring from acting, for real this time

Look, we’ll admit to a certain amount of trepidation with this story—because the wily bastard has burnt us before—but Michael Caine says he’s retiring from acting. This should not be wholly surprising, in so far as Caine is now 90, an age at which relatively few people are still on that daily grind. But, like we said: Caine is foxy. Can’t take your eyes off the guy.

This is per THR, though, which reports that Caine appears to have well-and-truly decided to hang up his craft, having finally starred in “a picture where I’ve played the lead, and it’s got incredible reviews,” referencing his new film The Great Escaper. Because Michael Caine is still pretty funny (when he’s not trotting out some fairly predictable canards about what you are or aren’t allowed to say these days) he did note, in this same BBC Radio 4 interview, that “The only parts I’m likely to get now are old men, 90-year-old men — well, maybe 85, you know?” Ultimately concluding that, “I might as well leave with all this. I’ve got wonderful reviews. What am I gonna do to beat this?”

To which we say: We’ll believe it when we see it. The Great Escaper is the man’s seventh movie of the 2020s (although most of those movies were filmed before the COVID-19 pandemic, admittedly), a period that also saw him publish his first novel, after penning a series of memoirs in earlier years. (In fact, Caine made a point in the interview that he’s only retiring from acting, and intends to continue to write.) Guy is relentless, is all we’re saying, and we refuse to be tricked by his cunning words again.