Jack Nicholson’s Tough Refusal: Why He Turned Down a Desperate $10 Million Plea
When Tom Sizemore hit rock bottom, he turned to Jack Nicholson for a massive loan. Nicholson’s blunt response reveals the hard lessons he learned from a lifetime surrounded by addiction.
There’s a pattern that’s played out time and again in the world of showbiz: the lure of drugs, followed by the inevitable fallout. The creative scene and substance abuse have always been tangled up together, and few have seen the damage up close quite like Jack Nicholson. He was right in the thick of it during the wild days of the 1960s, a regular at the parties, and a mate to some of the most notorious figures of the era. If you were starring in Easy Rider or dating a member of The Mamas and the Papas, chances are you weren’t exactly living clean. And if you were mates with Hunter S Thompson, you’d probably seen your fair share of chaos.
Nicholson’s reputation as a party bloke carried on well past the sixties, through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and even into the early 2000s, when he was linked to the next wave of partygoers. But for anyone in that crowd, the dark side of drug use was impossible to ignore. Everyone lost someone, everyone saw talent wasted, and everyone had to face the consequences at some point. For Nicholson, the reality of it all hit home more than once. The death of Heath Ledger was a particularly hard blow. After Ledger passed, Nicholson said,
‘I warned him’
, having tried to step in when he saw things going off the rails. But the cycle kept repeating, especially during his younger, wilder years.
Tom Sizemore’s Downward Spiral
So when Tom Sizemore came knocking, desperate and deep in the grip of addiction, Nicholson wasn’t about to get involved. Sizemore, born in 1961, was a generation younger but shared the same taste for excess. By the time he was 15, he was already hooked. It’s a wonder he managed to carve out a career at all, but somehow he did, landing roles in iconic films like Saving Private Ryan, Natural Born Killers, True Romance, and Heat. He worked alongside some of the biggest names in the business, but behind the scenes, he was struggling to keep it together.
Very few people manage to escape that kind of situation without things getting seriously grim. For Sizemore, the lowest point came in 2009. Despite his impressive filmography, he was broke and at a loss. He told the Daily Mail,
‘I wasn’t homeless, but I had to fast sell my $7million house. This is how fucked up I was,’
recalling how he ended up living in a squat or just driving around in his car, coming up with wild schemes to get back on his feet.
The $10 Million Question
One of those schemes involved asking his famous mates for help.
‘I was thinking I’m gonna get the money to buy a $5million home, and I’m asking certain people for money,’
he said, describing how he started reaching out to well-known friends for loans. The boldest ask was to Jack Nicholson:
‘Can you loan me $10million?’
Nicholson’s answer was as blunt as they come:
‘In a word, no’
.
No one in their right mind was going to hand over that kind of cash to someone so deep in addiction, especially not someone who’d seen the worst of it firsthand. Nicholson, having lost friends and only recently put his own wild days behind him, knew that saying no was the only way he could help.