David Bowie pulled down the curtain on touring in 2004, bringing one chapter of his illustrious career to an end, but he wasn’t quite done with the big screen. In 2006, it had been a few years since his major role, and that had come in the low-profile Canadian film Mr Rice’s Secret. No, us neither. It seemed that apart from a cameo here and there, Bowie was happy to leave his acting career behind too, but then Christopher Nolan came calling. Bowie said no. And then Christopher Nolan came calling again.
The future Oppenheimer director and Oscar winner was coming off the back of a successful reboot of the Batman franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins and he’d brought two of the cast with him in Christian Bale and Michael Caine for his next project, a twisty-turny tale of the battle between two magicians in Victorian London titled The Prestige. But he had hit a bump in the road when it came to casting the real-life figure of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American engineer and inventor. Who could portray this otherworldly, ahead-of-his-time figure, Nolan fretted? And then he hit upon a solution, recalling it to Entertainment Weekly in a tribute to Bowie after his death in 2016.
