My Night with Sean Connery
The title is slightly misleading I did not know Sean Connery. Certainly, not in the sense that his close family and friends did. I did not even meet him. But when I tell this story, I use the word ‘met’, even though I am careful to make sure that it is used in inverted commas.
So this is how I ‘met’ Sean Connery.
It was June 2008 at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and I had been invited up there as a guest of an insurance company who wanted to take a bunch of journalists out for the weekend. I was working those days as a reporter on Cover. It was common in those days for things to happen. In the B2B press, there were a lot of free lunches and junkets—meals in nice hotels; tickets to the tennis, or football, or rugby; concert trips; drinks at the top of the Gherkin. Most of November each year was taken up with awards shows, and I would often spend each night of that month in a Park Lane hotel at another magazine’s annual awards, a guest of an insurance company.
The premiere we went to see was for the small film Stone of Destiny. It was terrible. Online, it says that reviews were fairly mixed, but Channel 4 reportedly said that it was ‘a woeful slice of sentimental whimsy’. That is a fairly good summation.
Directed by Charles Martin Smith, best known as the accountant in The Untouchables, Stone of Destiny was a genteel comedy about how students from the University of Glasgow snuck down to London to reclaim the Stone of Scone that sat in Westminster Abbey. Along the way, it dealt out some heavy-handed lessons about how awful the English were to the Scots.
The premiere took place at the Cineworld on the outskirts of the city. We had been out drinking the night before and one of our guys, who I’ll rename ‘Paul’, had begun drinking in London, stayed up all night, gotten on a place to Scotland, and carried on drinking. After a long, booze-filled lunch, we headed to a cocktail bar where, being teetotal, I slid each of my drinks to Paul who gladly drank them. Over a couple of hours, we watched him melt like a candle. We left there, headed back to our hotel to change, then went to the cinema. There, Paul started drinking another beer before we went into the film.
Within five minutes, Paul was asleep. Given how bad Stone of Destiny is, that was probably a good idea.
When the lights came up at the end, I noticed Sean Connery was in the crowd. I nudged Paul to wake him, then told him. A few moments later, he jumped out of his seat and went to say hello. Security stepped in and blocked his way.
We got onto a coach and went to the National Portrait Gallery, which was hosting a post-movie dinner. Paul continued drinking. We were stood, looking at the paintings, when Connery walked up next to us, accompanied by his wife. He wore a purple rollneck with a blue jacket. His arm was in a sling.
Paul went over to introduce himself. There was no escape now.
“Sean!” he said, “Sean!” Connery turned and paused. A quizzical look flittered across his face. Paul stopped talking. He had, drunkenly, run out of things to say. A pause, then “Have you seen Indiana Jones IV yet? Because you’re not in it, and it’s shit.”
“Well, yes, I saw it last week and, no, I wasn’t impressed.”
Paul nodded, a little too vigorously. “Yeah, yeah.”
Connery looked at him. “So where are we sitting for dinner?” he said. There were a hundred tables behind him. It was obvious where dinner was going to be.
“Over there!”
“Well, thanks.” With that, the man who was Bond turned and fled. We never saw him again.
It rained hard that night and we stood in a little shelter waiting for a taxi outside the Gallery. It was late and it had been a long day. We started talking about the film and we were, to use a phrase an Irish friend of mine uses, ‘giving out’ about it. A lot. For a long time.
We sensed somewhere behind us. It was the two stars. He would go on to be Daredevil in the Netflix TV series, and she would become the reporter in the first season of House of Cards. They ignored us. We stopped talking about the film. Their car came and they left.
We started giving out about the film again. This time, we did not notice the director come out behind us. For a long time. We made every joke we could. Eventually, we turned around. He either did not hear us or he was gracious enough to pretend that he had not. His friend was talking to him about how Stone of Destiny was a film that really connected with people.
We went quiet again and waited for our taxi. Given the impressive amount Paul had put away, it was a surprise to see him still standing. Silently, we waited for our taxi, which turned up a few moments later and we cut through the pouring rain, into it, and went home.
