Oak Bluff, Massachusetts man Jonathan Searle tells Remind Magazine that his very brief career as a child actor playing the kid who wore a fake shark fin during a scene in 1975’s Jaws hasn’t had any cosmic bearing on his current role as real chief of police in the town of Oak Bluff, which stood in as the fictional Amity in the film, thus putting Searle in the shoes of Roy Scheider’s Brody.
“Zero. Never. The only shark bite that we had was someone fishing for sharks and caught one. It was hooked, and they were dragging him into the surf, and the shark slid into him riding a wave and accidentally bit him in the leg,” the 61 year-old Searle told the outlet when asked if there had been any shark attacks during his tenure. They either didn’t bother asking if he ever had to respond to a panic caused by a kid wearing a shark fin at a beach or the answer was so terse they didn’t print it.
Asked how Oak Bluff has changed since the movie premiered over a half-century ago, the lawman said “Population-wise, it started after Jaws put it on the map. Hate to say Ted Kennedy put it on the map in the late 60s [referring to adjacent Edgartown and Chappaquiddick]. Yeah. And then Jaws put it on the map, and then visiting presidents Clinton and Obama put it on the map even more. So, our population now is, I’m guessing, two and a half times what it was back in the seventies, and a lot of year-round population. Summer population, I’m guessing roughly 22 to 24,000 year-round, and in the summer that’s easily 120 to 150,000 at least,” just ever-so-casually alluding to the day-to-day headaches he experiences on the job as top cop in a seasonal beach town, busy seasons yet to be punctuated by having to blow up a bus-sized great white shark with a flare gun and oxygen tanks.