Richard Dreyfuss Bites Broadway’s ‘The Shark Is Broken’, Says Play Makes Him Look Like “A Big Jerk”
deadline.comJaws actor Richard Dreyfuss recently caught a performance of Broadway‘s The Shark Is Broken, the comedy-drama about the making of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster.
Despite the smile on his face in meet-the-cast photos, he wasn’t very happy. In an exclusive Vanity Fair interview, Dreyfuss criticizes the play – written by and co-starring Ian Shaw, dead-ringer son of the late Jaws actor Robert Shaw – for what he says are inaccuracies and for making him look like “a big jerk.” “I went to see it, to see if it really was gonna hurt,” Dreyfuss tells VF‘s Chris Murphy. “And it did.” The comedy, based in part on Robert Shaw’s diary, depicts the long-rumored feud between Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw during the film’s hurry-up-and-wait Cape Cod shooting as the the cast – Dreyfuss, Shaw and Roy Scheider – was all but sequestered on the floating Orca set.
Dreyfuss, played by Alex Brightman, is depicted as neurotic and insecure, while Shaw’s non-stop drinking continually slows down an already tortuous shoot.
Denying a feud, Dreyfuss tells VF, “When we were surrounded by lots of other people, Robert would take digs at me, and I would take a dig at him.
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