Apocalypse Now Star Felt "Embarrassed" By The Iconic Mirror Scene 46 Years Later

Martin Sheen has good reason for wanting to forget his 36th birthday. The 85-year-old actor says he’s embarrassed by what he did on that day nearly 50 years ago, as he suffered through a profound emotional crisis while filming Francis Ford Coppola’s legendary war movie Apocalypse Now.

Sheen related his feelings to Josh Horowitz, describing how things went down on that day in 1976 when his alcohol-fueled meltdown was caught on film, becoming Apocalypse Now’s iconic mirror-smashing scene:

That particular day was my 36th birthday, and I was wildly out of control with alcohol and going through a very deep emotional catharsis. I remember drinking all day, and it was night when we got to that.

There was no actual scene. There wasn’t any dialogue for that. [Coppola] had rewritten the whole opening, so we were improvising a lot of that. Francis really wanted to call it a wrap and I said, “Let’s keep going here. Something might happen.”

I was always embarrassed by it, of course. I never saw it until it was in the film. He wanted me to see it when when the rushes came back from Rome a few weeks later. And I said, “No.” He said, “Well, it may be in the film.” I said, “Well, that’s your choice.” I couldn’t bear to watch it. No, I never wanted to watch it. I had a pretty good idea of what I’d done. I wasn’t very proud of it. I was crazy.

The Vietnam War-set Apocalypse Now famously opens with Sheen’s Captain Willard stuck in Saigon while waiting for a mission. His bored hotel room binge-drinking gets out of control, and in his drunken rage, he uses a martial arts punch on a mirror, shattering the glass, and leaving himself with a cut on his hand.

As detailed in Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s famed 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Sheen was actually inebriated in the scene, and suffered a real cut on his hand when he punched the mirror. The documentary also details Sheen’s later near-fatal heart attack on the Apocalypse Now set, and the production delay that ensued while he recuperated.

Director Coppola has made many famous statements about the tortuous process of shooting of his iconic Vietnam War epic. “My movie is not about Vietnam…my movie is Vietnam,” he stated when Apocalypse Now premiered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.

Coppola mortgaged all he owned in order to finance his Palme d’Or-winning adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, after its initial $12 million budget ballooned to over $30 million. The experience did not serve as a long-term deterrent to the maverick Coppola, now 86, who spent a reported $120 million on the recent box office flop Megalopolis.

Sheen talked about his own harrowing experience on Apocalypse Now to The View back in 2015, saying, “If anybody told me going in that all the things were going to happen that did, I would have passed of course. But no regrets.”

Sheen has also expressed gratitude over his life-changing Apocalypse Now experience, telling Yahoo! back in 2022, “It forced me to come to grips with parts of myself that I otherwise may never have embraced. I’m grateful to Francis for that.”

Apocalypse Now has gone on to become regarded as a classic of cinema, ranking 19th on Sight & Sound’s 2022 list of the greatest movies of all-time. Coppola has released multiple versions of the film over the years, including 2019’s “Final Cut.”