9 Amazing Performances By Actors Who Stopped Giving A Damn

By his own admission, Robert Shaw didn't take his profession too seriously. And by most accounts, he didn't take his sobriety too seriously, either, which caused a whirlwind of ungiven f*cks on the set of Jaws. The combination of rampant alcoholism and incessant pranking somehow helped churn out the most memorable performance of Shaw's long career.

According to one story, Shaw drank himself into a blackout while he was filming the famous S.S. Indianapolis monologue. He'd convinced Steven Spielberg that he should be a bit tipsy for the scene, since his character had been hitting the bottle. It was basically alcoholism masquerading as method acting. Unsurprisingly, not much work got done that day.

When he wasn't drinking, Shaw was humiliating his co-star, Richard Dreyfuss. He'd spray him with a firehose or convince him to jump off frighteningly tall edifices for a hundred bucks. Basically, one of the greatest characters of all time was borne from one boozehound's flair for f*cking off in grandiose ways.

A couple of years after he finished Jaws, Shaw was asked about his penchant for boozing, to which he responded "Can you imagine being a movie star and having to take it seriously without a drink?" And indeed, it seems like the loosey-goosey approach Shaw took in bringing fisherman/shark bait Quint to life probably made the best version of the character.