'Hurt' Richard Dreyfuss Calls Out 'Jaws' Broadway Play Over His Depiction
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Richard Dreyfuss has a bone to pick with the writers of the new Broadway show based on the making of Jaws.
The actor—who starred as Matt Hooper in the original 1975 Steven Spielberg film—recently attended a performance of The Shark Is Broken, a fictional retelling of the behind-the-scenes drama between Dreyfuss and costars Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw during the making of Jaws.
He saw the show, which was written by Shaw's son Ian Shaw, earlier this month, and even smiled for photos with some of the stars after the performance—but apparently, he wasn't impressed.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Dreyfuss, 75, admitted that the whole experience was "pretty awful."
"Ian—who has more than any right to write whatever he wants—never called me and said, ‘Give me some background,'" Dreyfuss told the outlet. "Or, ‘Give me your take on this and this.’ And they just decided to make my character a big jerk."
"The problem is that they made my character the fool," her further lamented. "They didn’t do that to Roy, and they didn’t do that to Robert. And that hurt because it wasn’t true."
There have long been rumors of a feud between Shaw and Dreyfuss on the set of Jaws, rumors he claims were started by Spielberg and co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb.
"Thirty years after the film is over, I start to hear this thing about a feud," he said, adding that didn't "pay too much attention" to the gossip.
But in terms of the new play, Dreyfuss was disappointed to see his portrayal, telling the publication, "I don’t think they just gave it any thought that it would hurt me, and it did."
He concluded, "I have to say that Carl and Steven knew better, knew that there was no feud. There was an ongoing kind of humor between us. If you only saw us on the set, then you might think that there was something—a feud that was going on—but it was never real. Never. And I hold that against Carl and Steven."
