The Real Reason These Jaws Stars Reunited More Than 30 Years After The Film's Release
With various pop culture conventions taking place across the country practically every weekend throughout the year, casts from famous films or television shows reunite for their fans. Even when the COVID-19 pandemic put the kibosh on in-person events, actors like Josh Gad reunited famous casts virtually, giving fans a welcome distraction in 2020. Of course, cast reunions generally involve the principal players from a film or TV show, but once in a great while, actors known for smaller, still-iconic scenes find a way to get together. In the case of director Stephen Spielberg's classic thriller "Jaws," one such reunion was so random that the story is worth repeating.
Based on Peter Benchley's best-selling novel of the same name, "Jaws" instantly terrified moviegoers when it was released in 1975. The film begins when an unassuming woman (Susan Backlinie) goes out for a skinny-dip off the coast of Amity Island in Massachusetts and is massacred by a great white shark. The next attack takes the life of young Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees), prompting police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and a shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to try to hunt down and kill the beast.
The Jaws scenes that made this reunion for a movie mother and son so poignant
Quint is introduced in the film in grand fashion (fingernails on a chalkboard, anyone?) during a town meeting after Alex's death in the shallow waters of the Amity Island beach. Still struggling to grasp the reality that a shark is behind two vicious murders, Amity authorities offer a $3,000 reward to anyone who slays the beast. The grizzled vet ridicules the reward amount, saying, "I'll find him for three [thousand dollars], but I'll catch him and kill him for 10 [thousand dollars]" (via YouTube).
There's jubilance early in the shark hunt as hunters produce what they believe is the shark responsible for Alex's death. The catch is no consolation for Alex's grieving mother, Mrs. Kintner (Lee Fierro), who slaps Brody, saying her son's death could have been prevented: "I just found out that a girl was killed here last week, and you knew it. You knew there was a shark out there. You knew it was dangerous, but you let people go swimming anyway. You knew all of those things, but still, my boy is dead now. There's nothing you can do about it. My boy is dead. I wanted you to know that" (via YouTube).
Jeffrey Voorhees and Lee Fierro's reunion happened in the same town where Jaws was filmed
In a 2014 interview with The New Daily, a grown-up Jeffrey Voorhees recalled how his screen mom visited the restaurant he managed in the Martha's Vineyard-area town where Spielberg filmed "Jaws." The unlikely encounter reportedly took place approximately 25 years after the actors worked on the film.
"At the restaurant I run, there is a sandwich called the 'Alex Kintner Burger' and one time this lady came in with her friend and I recognized instantly it was my mother from the film," Voorhees recalled. "So, I said approached her table and said, 'Can I ask you a very personal question? If you think this is a little odd tell me to go away, but do you believe in reincarnation, because I think I died years ago, and you look like my mother from a previous life.'"
After Lee Fierro realized she was talking with Voorhees, she kept the gag going. According to the "Jaws" actor, his movie mom replied, "'Oh, my God, I had a son that died years ago in the ocean!' And everyone in the restaurant, including her friend, were just wondering what the hell was going on."
Fierro, who reprised her role as Mrs. Kintner in the critically maligned 1987 sequel "Jaws: The Revenge" (via Rotten Tomatoes), died at age 91 of complications from COVID-19 in April 2020, according to The Hollywood Reporter.