One Jaws Actor Basically Cast Himself In Steven Spielberg's Movie

Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" forever altered the commercial filmmaking landscape 50 years ago when it became the highest grossing movie in Hollywood history. His film held the box office crown for a whole two years until George Lucas' "Star Wars" exploded into theaters and affirmed that the motion picture industry was now a blockbuster-driven realm.

This is still true a half-century later, but there have been aesthetic shifts along the way. For instance, back then we lived with a different constellation of movie stars. Sure, there were still impossibly handsome leading men (e.g. Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Burt Reynolds), but audiences would often line up to see movies featuring regular-looking guys portraying underdogs who were battling a stacked-deck system. They looked like the local fire chief, your little league baseball coach, or maybe even your dad. They might be bulb-nosed misanthropes scrambling to hold it together (like Walter Matthau in "The Bad News Bears"), or simply men who wearily did their job, grabbed a sixer on the way home from work, and daddied it up until the kids were ready for bed. 

That was the 1970s vibe. We loved our flawed, weathered, up-against-it heroes, and I don't think anyone embodied this type more palpably than Roy Scheider. He made a major impression as the reasonable, by-the-book partner of Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle in William Friedkin's classic "The French Connection." So when he encountered Steven Spielberg at a Hollywood party one night in the mid-1970s at the exact moment the up-and-coming director couldn't find the right actor for the everyman lead in "Jaws," Scheider seized the moment and got himself cast as Police Chief Martin Brody.

Spielberg had the wunderkind glow about him in the early- to mid-1970s, but he had yet to make good on his potential via a commercial hit. Though he had Universal head honcho Lew Wasserman squarely in his corner, after the box office disappointment of "The Sugarland Express," "Jaws" was a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. 

Before dealing with the technical challenges of shooting the film on open water, Spielberg needed to find his Brody, a man whose abject fear of the water would feel relatable rather than cowardly. He couldn't find that guy. Then, per a 2023 Vanity Fair interview, he went to a Hollywood party and had an angel of an actor alight on his shoulder. As Spielberg told VF:

"I remember going to a party one night, and Roy Scheider, whom I loved from 'The French Connection,' came and sat down next to me and said, 'You look awfully depressed.' I told him, 'Oh no, I'm not depressed. I'm just having trouble casting my movie.' He asked what the film was — I explained it was based on a novel called Jaws and told him the entire plot. At the end of it, Roy said, 'Wow, that's a great story! What about me?' I looked at him and said, 'Yeah, what about you? You'd make a great Chief Brody!'"

Spielberg has foregrounded his family issues to such a hyper-personal degree that it's impossible to watch "Jaws" and not see the rise-to-the-occasion man he wished his father could be. Gary Cooper against the world. Via Scheider's hugely sympathetic performance, Spielberg created the platonic ideal of a down-but-not-out dad in "Jaws." Aside from Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird," there may not be a better movie dad than Martin Brody.