The 2006 movie Robert Redford couldn’t stand making: “You’re going to have to break into a falsetto”
Every actor with a lengthy career should try to tick off as many different boxes as possible, but when Robert Redford ventured into uncharted territory, all he got was a miserable experience.
As one of the defining leading men of the ‘New Hollywood’ era, Redford maintained his stardom for decades, without falling into the same traps that blighted many of his peers. He didn’t chase the money, he didn’t do franchises, and he’d rarely take an easy paycheque at the expense of dramatic substance.
Then again, that stance did soften in his later years. At the urging of his agent, who was concerned that his popularity was on the wane, the Academy Award-winning director agreed to headline Indecent Proposal and Sneakers to remind audiences that he was still a big deal, but it wasn’t until the 21st century that it became more of a recurring habit than ever before.
He kicked off the new millennium with a Tony Scott blockbuster, Spy Game, played a villain in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and lent his gravitas to a live-action Disney remake when he popped up in David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon, avenues that it would have been unthinkable for him to walk down in the ’70s and ’80s when artistic integrity was always at the forefront of his mind.
Redford also ticked off another first in 2006 when he supplied his first-ever voiceover performance in an animated feature, joining a stacked roster that included Julia Roberts, Steve Buscemi, Oprah Winfrey, John Cleese, and Kathy Bates as Ike the Horse in Gary Winick’s live-action/CGI adaptation of Charlotte’s Web.
Unfortunately, he had an awful time, with producer Jordan Kerner recalling one of the requests he made of the legendary star. “Sometimes, you have to push a dramatic actor to do a ridiculous scene,” he offered. “In Charlotte’s Web, Robert Redford had to be a horse scared of spiders. And I said to him, ‘You’re going to have to break into a falsetto. This is going to be your first comic movie.”
That doesn’t sound too bad, at least within the context of standing in a recording booth and being paid to spout a few lines, but when renowned critic Leonard Maltin quizzed Redford about it, he got the other side of the story. He asked the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid icon if he enjoyed voicing an arachnophobe equine, and the response was as simple as it was illuminating: “No, he didn’t!”
With the live-action shooting taking place in Australia, and Redford recording his lines alone in a recording studio in California, he felt isolated and removed from Charlotte’s Web, making it a lonely and unwilling experience, or, as Maltin put it, “He had been looking forward to the gig, but it wound up being a disappointment.”
That didn’t stop Redford from returning to voice work in the future, though, even if his contributions to Omniboat: A Fast Boat Fantasia will probably go unheard, with the animated anthology still unreleased after premiering at the 2020 edition of the Sundance Film Festival.
