Whatever it takes! Harry Hamlin was one of the few lucky actors on the shortlist to play Indiana Jones — but the audition process was anything but typical.
Hamlin, 68, recalled his 1978 audition during an interview with Page Six on Thursday, January 2. Director Steven Spielberg and writer George Lucas asked the Clash of the Titans star to read for the role of Indiana Jones alongside actress Stephanie Zimbalist, who was auditioning to play Marion.
“When I got there, Steven came down,” Hamlin told Page Six. “He said, ‘Harry, Stephanie, I’m so sorry, but George’s plane is going to be late. He’s flying down from San Francisco and it’s going to be at least 45 minutes until he gets here.'”
In a strange turn of events, the director apparently asked the two actors to make a chocolate cake from scratch that would be ready once Lucas, 75, finally arrived.
“He closed the door and left and we were standing alone in this kitchen,” Hamlin continued. “I said, ‘Stephanie, have you ever made a chocolate cake?’ And she said, ‘No…'”
For the next 40 minutes, the three-time Golden Globe nominee and Zimbalist, 63, attempted to bake a cake with no recipe to follow. “It never occurred to me … that we were actually in the audition while we were making the cake,” Hamlin reminisced.
According to the TAE Technologies cofounder, Spielberg and Lucas had bugged the kitchen with cameras and microphones to get a better sense of the chemistry between the two potential Raiders of the Lost Ark stars. Hamlin explained to Page Six that he had been telling Zimbalist about his friend Amy Irving, who was having a bit of trouble avoiding the advances of a particular director.
“I was talking about how Amy was calling her friend group in L.A. and saying that this guy, this director guy was stalking her in New York and how she was kind of getting annoyed because this guy, Steven Spielberg, was showing up at the stage door every night with flowers,” Hamlin said in the interview.
Irving, 66, would later marry the “annoying” Spielberg in 1985. The couple stayed together for four years before eventually calling it quits in 1989.
“I’d been riffing on how annoying Steven Spielberg was to my friend Amy, so hey, guess what? I didn’t get the part, okay,” Hamlin joked. “I’ve never worked with Steven Spielberg, and I grant you that I never will work with Steven Spielberg and I never learned how to make a cake.”
