In the Nicolas Cage film The Weather Man (2005), there is a moment toward the end when Michael Caine’s character, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Cage’s father, is given a living funeral to mark his imminent death from lymphoma. The actor may feel as if he’s currently living out a real-life version of the scene, so fulsome have the tributes been after he announced his retirement from acting during an interview with the BBC on Oct. 14 about his latest film, The Great Escaper. “I keep saying I’m going to retire,” Caine said. “Well, I am now. I’ve figured, I’ve had a picture where I’ve played the lead and had incredible reviews. … What am I going to do that will beat this?”

Caine has flirted with quitting the game in the past. The actor said in 2017 that “the movies retire you. You don’t retire from the movies. You don’t get a script or the script’s crap or the money’s no good and you say, ‘I’d rather stay home and watch TV.’” There have been several films in the last couple of decades of Caine’s career that give the impression of being signed up to virtually at random: Even the most committed of his admirers might hesitate before wasting two hours on The Last Witch Hunter (2015), Medieval (2022) or Now You See Me 2 (2016).