Unlikely celebrity crossovers are one the greatest things about the entertainment industry. They remind us that we don’t actually know anything about the stars with whom we’ve formed parasocial relationships and help hammer home the point that these people actually aren’t “just like us”. There are plenty of stories out there to delight in, but one of the most charming involves George Harrison, Martin Short, a joint, and a Sean Connery movie.
Short made a name for himself in the 1980s as a performer on sketch comedy shows like Second City Television and Saturday Night Live. As a larger-than-life figure, he’s spent much of his career doing live performances, even winning a Tony Award in 1999 for the Neil Simon musical, Little Me. He’s also appeared in movies like Three Amigos and Frankenweenie and, more recently, starred in the cosy mystery series Only Murders in the Building.
He’s met some of the greatest celebrities of the past five decades during his career, but as the comedian revealed on Conan O’Brien’s show in 2019, George Harrison was the one person he couldn’t believe he actually got to meet.
“It was 1990,” Short recounted, “And this fabulous Hollywood couple that I won’t reveal their names phoned me up and said, ‘We’re having a dinner party, how would you like to meet a Beatle?’” The comedian was, understandably, giddy with excitement, but the evening didn’t go exactly as he’d imagined it. For one thing, when they got to the party, Harrison was struggling to get the guests to listen to his latest unreleased Traveling Wilburys album. Short described hanging on every lyric even as the other members of the party drifted away to the bar.
After dinner, they all sat down to watch The Hunt for Red October, and as luck would have it, Harrison sat down next to him. When the host of the party busted out a joint and passed it around, Short took a puff and then handed it to Harrison.
“Ahhhh,” Short remembered him saying, holding the joint aloft as if holding up a diamond to the light, “The ‘60s.”
Harrison was not so enthused about the film they were watching. Based on Tom Clancy’s novel of the same name, The Hunt for Red October is a nail-biting thriller set during the Cold War in which a Soviet naval captain, played by Connery, attempts to defect to the US and reveal state secrets. But he can’t communicate his intentions without jeopardising the mission, so it’s up to CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) to convince the US government of the plan based on the data he’s collected.
It was nominated for three Academy Awards and won for ‘Best Special Effects’, but Harrison wasn’t a fan of Connery’s performance. After taking a puff on the joint, Short remembered that the Beatle “started talking really loudly, way too loud for a screening,” and complained, “You know I can’t watch Sean Connery. It’s like watching a Beatle, he’s too famous.”
Perhaps this was just a nice way of saying that the Scottish star made absolutely no attempt to conceal his famous Scottish accent. While it’s true that the filmmakers opted to switch from Russian to unaccented English for the sake of ease, it is impossible not to see Sean Connery first and, with effort, a Russian naval captain second.
