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Jeffrey Voorhees, Who Played Shark Victim Alex Kintner, Looks Back on Jaws Role 49 Years Later
Under very, very rare conditions, getting snacked on by a great white can yield enormous dividends.
Under very, very rare conditions, getting snacked on by a great white shark can yield enormous financial dividends. That's exactly what happened for Jeffrey Voorhees, the man who played ill-fated Alex Kintner in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (now streaming on Peacock and SYFY) almost half a century ago.
"It pays to die," Voorhees tells SYFY WIRE with a smile, holding up a recent residual check over Zoom. "My brother lives over in Portugal right now and I’ll get a text from him: ‘Good news! You just died on TV over here.’ You get a little check."
Even a cleared check is worth big money, as he learned when someone from England once requested his signature on a royalty slip he'd thrown out in 1981. "I go, ‘Where the hell did you get this?’ And she's like, ‘Oh, on eBay!’ I go, ‘How much did you pay for something I threw away back in 1981?’ She was so excited, she goes, ‘Oh, we got it for $8,700!’ So, I don’t throw them away anymore. You get some real Jaws fanatics who will pay big bucks [for them]. We bring them to signings now."
Given that he was only 12-years-old during the shoot on Martha's Vineyard, Voorhees didn't fully comprehend the film's impact until much later in life. "I kind of hid from it for years," he admits, explaining that the attention was just too much, especially when he first opened a restaurant, The Wharf, in downtown Edgartown. What finally got Voorhees to embrace his role in the original summer blockbuster was the rise of the internet and international fan conventions.
For More on Jaws:
Model Who Posed As Ill-Fated Swimmer for Iconic Jaws Poster Preaches Shark Protection
How Steven Spielberg's First Theatrical Movie (and Box Office Bomb) Led to Jaws
Steven Spielberg Recalls How a Man Puked on the Theater Floor During an Early Screening of Jaws
Looking Back on Jaws with Jeffrey Voorhees, Who Played Unfortunate Alex Kintner
"You meet up with people who are such Jaws fanatics," Voorhees says, remembering how one mega-Kintner fan drove to Chicago from Indianapolis just to get his autograph on a yellow raft identical to the one Alex uses in the movie. "She was in tears and I signed the raft for her. She finally smiled. It’s like, ‘Okay, if it makes some people that happy, you get a little high of that.’ You make a few bucks and make some people really happy."
These events — like ScareFest in Lexington, Kentucky last fall, for instance — often reunite him with a number of other cast members like Richard Dreyfuss (Matt Hooper), Jeffrey Kramer (Deputy Hendricks), and, until recently, the late Susan Backlinie (Chrissie Watkins). "She had me trained," Voorhees says of Backlinie, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 77. "She would always write, ‘First victim’ and then sign her name. So, if I was doing a signing and she was there, I wrote, ‘Second victim' [and signed my name]."
In addition to sanctioning the creation of an official website on which fans can purchase signed prints and other Alex Kintner-themed merchandise, Voorhees also joined Cameo. One particularly bizarre request over the last year came from the children of a man who had died on the couch during a telecast of Jaws. Rather than ignore it, Voorhees — who likes to film Cameo messages while running his dog along the very beach where his character got eaten — leaned into the absurdity.
"I hold up my phone and go, ‘Hey, your father and I had a little something in common. He died watching me die. This is the dead Alex Kintner, Jeff Voorhees, here on Martha’s Vineyard, Amity Island. Have a Jaw-some funeral.’ I thought they were gonna be pissed and they [gave me a five-star review]. People get so psyched about it."
His faux death by shark has made Voorhees a local celebrity on Martha's Vineyard, particularly within a residents-only group chat, in which one of the members tried (and failed) to shame him for bringing his dog on the beach. "I knew the guy was mad because I had a dog on the beach, but it’s early in the morning. No one’s there, screw you. Later, someone’s like, ‘You see you’re [in the chat]?’ We pull it up on the internet and [the post says] ‘This guy’s breaking the rules. He has his damn dog on the beach.’ All the sudden, people start responding, ‘That’s not a dog, that’s a ghost. That’s Pipit and the dead Alex Kintner. Ghosts are allowed on the beach. Don’t worry, a ghost-dog can’t sh** on the beach. This guy was just getting abused and he took it off after two days of abuse."
While he's made enough to enjoy a comfortable retirement by the beach, Voorhees continues to entertain fans by regularly participating in a tour of Jaws shooting locations run by third-generation islander Dolores Borza, who was kind enough to connect us with Jeff in the first place.
Watch Jaws, Jaws 2, Jaws 3, and Jaws: The Revenge, all streaming now on Peacock!
