Michael Caine is 91. He was born in 1933, which was before the invention of sunscreen, the photocopier, the nuclear bomb, the microwave, Tupperware, Velcro, the Frisbee and seat belts in cars. And yet, he seems to have fallen in love with an invention less than 20 years old. Michael Caine loves X, the Web site still almost universally referred to as Twitter. He posts, not every day, but many times a month, and often multiple times in 24 hours—and has done so, with a few months-long breaks, since September 2010.
It’s clearly him who’s posting. There’s the odd dispatch promoting his work—he’s retired from acting these days, and seems to be writing thrillers instead—and these are grammatically correct and likely composed by his team. But the vast majority have a different style: very terse, and often with line breaks, giving them a kind of geezery Rupi Kaur effect. “What are your favourite music,” he tweeted on 9 June 2011. “Will stay up all night to see [line break] Super Bowl,” he tweeted on 11 February this year. On May 11: “Use The Difficulty [line break] You can.” A trio on 6 November last year: “Hello all of you.”; “Love”; “Chelsea”.
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
And like Kaur, he loves a bit of schmaltz: “Good Night My Sweet Ones” (23 April 2022); “It’s all about Love” (27 November 2023); “Will never give up on you” (5 January); “What’s it all about [line break] Peace” (31 January)”. On 27 September 2011: “You are a child of the Universe like the trees, you have a right to be here”. Compile these into a coffee table book, and market it to old buffers who like to buy old World War Two films on DVD, and you could make a tidy sum.
Another tweet of his, from lunchtime last Wednesday, reads simply: “Calm down”. It went viral—or more viral than usual—because it was almost certainly aimed at the far-right rioters who have been terrorizing Britain’s cities. Many of those rioters are probably the type to deeply appreciate Caine’s films. For him to seemingly slap them down, and with words you can easily imagine him issuing in a gravelly Cockney bark, was deeply satisfying.
