NEED TO KNOW
- The man who played young Sean Brody in the 1975 blockbuster Jaws is recounting his time on set
- Speaking to PEOPLE in an exclusive interview, Jay Mello says Jaws was his only movie, but he remembers every bit of it
- One of his most iconic scenes, he says, “wasn’t even written in the script”
Jay Mello was only 6 years old when his mom brought him to an audition with his brothers. She had heard about the open call through a children’s theater program at her church in Massachusetts: a Hollywood film crew was coming to town to film a movie about a shark. They needed two young children to play the main characters’ sons.
“My older brothers Tom and John were actually the ones auditioning,” Mello tells PEOPLE in a recent interview.
But when the two went into the audition room flanked by their mom and little brother, it was the youngest boy who caught the attention of an up-and-coming director named Steven Spielberg.
“I had a habit of copying people,” Mello remembers. “So when Steven Spielberg was interviewing them, I was copying him as he gave direction. When the interview was over, he said ‘You boys can go, we’re done. But the youngest can stay.’ ”
It was Mello, then, who was cast as Sean Brody, the youngest son of Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the police chief of the fictional Amity Island, a seaside New England town that finds itself plagued by a monstrous Great White shark in the summer of 1975.
Mello says that, despite his young age, he remembers every moment of filming on location in Martha’s Vineyard in 1974.
And one of his most prominent memories, of course, is of the shark itself.
“I do remember the first time I saw it,” Mello says of one of the animatronic sharks dreamed up by production designer Joe Alves and cemented in film history. “It was just the head part of the shark. I kind of questioned Shari Rhodes, who was the casting director. I said, ‘Where’s the rest of the shark?’ ”
Mello’s character, Sean, serves as a reminder of the softer side of Chief Brody. In one poignant scene, he mimics his dad – similar to what he did to Spielberg in the audition.
“That wasn’t even written in the script,” he says. “We were taking a break from a scene where I was sitting in a swing set, and we came inside and Roy Scheider was making funny faces and I was trying to mimic him. He called Steven Spielberg in and said, ‘We’ve got to add this to the film. This is going to be something.’ It really touched people’s hearts.”
Mello also remembers the older actors — like Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw — making him feel at home in between takes.
“There were times where the actors and Spielberg would gather at the lunch wagon and just kind of chill out and welcome me and the younger actors to sit with them and eat with them and talk about the movie,” he says. “It felt like one big family.”
Mello had no idea that the film would go on to become a box office juggernaut and propel Spielberg to household name status.
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Of course the film was also — especially for a 6-year-old — rather terrifying, though Mello was allowed to see parts of it when it was released in theaters one year after filming.
“It was strange to see myself on screen,” he says, admitting, “I didn’t get to see the whole thing because my mom and dad kept ducking my head under the seats.”
The first time he saw the scene in which local fisherman Ben Gardner’s head is found in a wrecked boat — making him the shark’s third victim — wasn’t until years later.
“That kind of haunts me,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t go back into the water for like two years after the movie was made.”
Mello’s family initially thought he might continue playing Sean Brody in the follow-up films — though, when it was announced that filming for Jaws 2 would take place in Florida, they decided against it.
But Mello kept up with the films — and his character, who was ultimately killed off (in a shark attack, no less) in 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge.
“I was very disappointed in that,” Mello says. “I figured that Sean Brody would become part of the Amity Island Police Department, like his dad, but I didn’t figure they would have killed him.”
In the years since, Mello has stayed out of show business, working at a maple syrup company in Vermont and occasionally telling tales of his brush with the most famous shark in entertainment history.
“I kept in touch with Roy Scheider before he passed away, and also Jeffrey Voorhees,” Mello says of the ill-fated Alex Kitner, a boy who is attached by the shark while playing on a raft. “I tried to reach out to Richard Dreyfuss but have gotten no response — same for Steven Spielberg.”
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Nonetheless, Jaws is a part of Mello — and he a part of its now 50-year legacy.
“Now, when I tell people I was in Jaws, they’ll say, ‘There’s no way you could have been that little boy,’ ” he says. “Then they start studying my face and it clicks.”
Fifty years after the film first premiered, Mello is still a fan and makes it a point to watch the original movie every year.
“My kids and my grandkids and I all gather around the television around Christmastime and watch it,” he says. “Every year, I pick something out something different to tell them. And I let them keep their eyes wide open.”
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