The actor Burt Reynolds called “a poser of a tough guy”
Even though the 1980s may have been when leading men became burlier and more vascular than ever before, thanks largely to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, the previous decade saw Burt Reynolds become a superstar in a period where tough guy leading men were all the rage.
It wasn’t a requirement to gain entry to the A-list as more introspective and sensitive souls like Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino made a habit of proving, but the rise of ‘New Hollywood’ nonetheless coincided with a surge of above-the-title stars who oozed machismo and played guys audiences were convinced could kick their ass.
Thanks to his glorious moustache, Reynolds looked the part, and he backed it up onscreen with a string of hit movies that indulged his need to project an air of invulnerability. Smokey and the Bandit, The Longest Yard, Semi-Tough, Hooper, and The Cannonball Run all found him playing extensions of roughly the same archetype, but he was far from being Tinseltown’s only in-demand tough guy.
Clint Eastwood had cornered his own share of the market, while Gene Hackman was grizzled and gruff enough to project menace. Jack Nicholson always looked as if he could fly off the handle at any second, and Charles Bronson built an entire franchise out of it in Death Wish, but Reynolds was adamant one of their numbers was a fraud.
He’d been friends with Eastwood since they were both jobbing actors struggling to make ends meet under contract at Universal, but Reynolds was happy to needle the future icon for the very same reasons he had to fight so hard to be taken seriously outside of his western wheelhouse in the 1960s.
“I said, ‘You know, you’re in a hell of a lot of trouble here,'” Reynolds recalled to Deadline. “When he asked why, and I said, ‘Well, how are you going to get rid of that fucking Adam’s apple? I can always learn how to act'”. Shots fired, but protruding throat or not, he was the peer the Deliverance star always felt closest to.
“Clint was the guy I liked the most,” he admitted. “The other guys, I didn’t think that much of in terms of, well, being number one.” The ‘other guys’ included Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, but there was one in particular Reynolds never jived with. “I thought Jimmy Caan was a poser of a tough guy all the time, and the other guys, I didn’t think of in that way. But Clint was the real deal.”
Caan became as successful as he did – when he wasn’t turning down huge roles left, right, and centre – because he was regularly cast as a tough guy. It was something he pulled off very well, but according to Reynolds, it was all an act put on by a guy he didn’t believe would be capable of fighting his way out of a wet paper bag.
