Roger Moore has always looked fantastically disturbed on screen as Her Majesty’s Secret Agent. Maybe he raises an eyebrow in a particularly hairy situation. However, in reality, the actor experienced some painful moments in person, especially while filming For Your Eyes Only, which is back on ITV tonight. Although it was less outlandish and ambitious than the previous sci-fi game Moonraker (on a much smaller budget), it provided Moore with one of the worst moments of his entire career. He might have said of the movie: “I’m happy with this movie. The bad guys are better known as normal humans. They don’t want to build empires in space or under the sea.” However, he wasn’t too happy about one memorable moment. Scroll down to see the entire scene.
Although he played one of the greatest action movie heroes in cinema history, he may not have been the star of classic action movies.
He joked, “I’ve done some stunts like jumping off a cliff with a parachute but I’ve always had a weakness for kissing scenes.”
He also subtly said, “I doubled up on the love scenes. I’m not good after the third take,” while insisting that stunts were another matter: “I do it all actually…I do all my lies to myself.”
But, out of fame, he struggled so hard with iconic moments in Only For Your Eyes.
The actor was known for his patience and professionalism in photography. In the previous Moonraker, he had quietly re-shot the scene with the malfunctioning gondola transformed into a hovercraft—though each time he threw it into the Venice Canal it had to be dried, treated, and restyled just for it to happen over and over again.
He also continued filming the scene where 007 got trapped in a zero-gravity simulator – though the process continued to bruise his face.
His sense of humor and team spirit were legendary.
He once admitted: “I have to have fun when I’m working. Work is fun for me. If there’s an atmosphere of tension on set, I’m gone. I have to walk around the corner and become aloof… I like to make fun, I like to play jokes and I like to practice Others jokes on me, and that’s what they do.”
“Roger was very humble, but he knew where he was, and he knew he was the star,” said For Your Eyes Only co-star Jack Claff, who played villain Apostis.
“When we were in Corfu, he would arrive every morning in his boat with a cigar and always say, ‘Never be afraid, the saint is here.’ Roger told an awful lot of really dirty jokes. His sparkle was an Olympic stake.”
Bond girl, Lynne Holly Johnson, praised: “The wonderfully protective warmth … the most charismatic, hysterical wise, yet always a good-hearted big man.”
However, only a certain sequence in the movie upset Moore so much, he needed drink and drugs to get through.
Incredibly, this wasn’t the moment he hit a speeding sled off the edge of a cliff with co-star John Wyman who said, “You freaked out for your life. You might think that was the end of it… We could have both gone off the beaten path.” The cliff and the guy (who was guiding the sleigh was heading in the wrong direction.”
Instead, it was the scene set against a cliff-top monastery in Greece.
Moore may have always looked like he’d never shaken or flipped, but he’d had a terrible fear his whole life – and this scene was his worst nightmare.
Even stuntman Rick Sylvester said, “From where we were, you can see the local cemetery; and the chest [to stop my fall] It looks like a casket. You didn’t need to be an English major to connect the dots.”
The scenes filmed around the vertigo slopes were a horror for Moore, who suffered from vertigo. Although he was only dangling over four feet tall (compared to Sylvester’s twenty feet).
Apparently, the actor has been dropping a soothing cocktail of valium and alcohol throughout shoot sessions for scenes that essentially require close-ups of him hanging on a sheer rock face.
[ad_2]
