Sir Michael Caine has responded to the claim that his 1964 film Zulu incites the far-right, calling it “bullshit”.
Earlier this year, the film was cited as a “key text” for “white nationalists/supremacists” during a review into the government’s counter-terrorism programme Prevent.
Speaking to The Spectator, Caine revealed he got the part of arrogant, inexperienced Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in Zulu after playing “a cockney bloke in the West End in a play called Next Time I’ll Sing To You.”
“An American director who was in the audience saw me and gave me a part in the film Zulu as a posh officer. This made me a star and I never went back on the stage again,” said Caine.
Responding to the news that Zulu was named a piece of culture that “incites the far-right”, Caine said: “That is the biggest load of bullshit I have ever heard.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he revealed “there are no films I wish I hadn’t made. I got paid for all of them,” and called his 70-year career “a miracle without the slightest difficulty.”
Zulu is a British epic war film depicting the Battle of Rorke’s Drift which saw 150 British soldiers hold off a force of 4,000 Zulu warriors during the Anglo-Zulu war in 1879. It, alongside The Bridge On The River Kwai, Brave New World, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and others, were flagged as “possible sources of inspiration for terrorist groups and far-right extremists” by the government’s Prevent strategy.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman recently said she “wholeheartedly” accepted all 34 recommendations to improve Prevent.
“Prevent needs major reform. Prevent needs to better understand the threats we face and the ideology underpinning them,” she said. “Prevent’s focus must solely be on security, not political correctness.”
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