The actor who tried to sabotage Burt Reynolds’ career: “He was the star of the show and he never let me forget it”
In an industry as cutthroat and competitive as cinema, every actor surely becomes acquainted with envious colleagues and outright enemies. For Burt Reynolds, this reality was made clear very early in his career. A known ladies’ man with a long career, it was always on the cards for him, but one actor in particular tried to do all he could to make sure Reynolds’ career never even got started.
Before his breakthrough in Gunsmoke, Reynolds landed what he thought would be his dream role at the ripe age of 23, after a few years in the theatre. He was cast alongside Darren McGavin in the NBC TV series Riverboat. With a leading role in Mike Spillane’s Mike Hammer already under his belt, McGavin was cast as the main character, Gavin Grey Holden, captain of the Mississippi riverboat Enterprise.
But this prominent role didn’t stop him from feeling jealous of his second in command, Reynolds, who played his partner and the ship’s main pilot. Whether it was due to his good looks or perceived potential, McGavin apparently decided early on that he wasn’t going to let Reynolds overshadow him. After all, he’d been grinding away in the industry for longer, while Burt had only just arrived in Hollywood and snapped up a spot next to him.
“He was the star of the show and he never let me forget it,” Reynolds explained years later. “He went out of his way to make me look bad on camera.” You might be wondering, how in the world does anyone make ‘The’ Burt Reynolds look bad on camera? That’s like making a puppy or Tom Sellick look bad, but as a more seasoned actor, McGavin knew all the tricks.
“I knew very little about film acting, and nothing about the dirty tricks actors play on one another,” said Reynolds. These dirty tricks included the timeless rug pull of rehearsing one way and acting it another, with a subtle “You’re going to play it that way, are you?” right before the cameras rolled.
Even more insidiously, he was constantly fiddling with something or subtly moving, as action was what tended to draw the audience’s eyes. Reynolds claimed McGavin was so good at it that he “found himself watching him in fascination.” These might seem like small acts of torture to us, but for a young, inexperienced actor like Reynolds at the time, they were crushing.
In the end, as we all know, McGavin wasn’t successful in sabotaging Reynolds. After all, Reynolds is a household name while few of us know who McGavin is. From network television to award-winning films like Boogie Nights, Reynolds went on to have a long, storied career and was an enduring sex symbol.
But that’s not to say that McGavin didn’t make things as difficult as possible for our Burt. He was so cruel and unwilling to share the spotlight that Reynolds left the show after 20 episodes despite signing on for two seasons. In the 1950s, with network television on the rise, this was a big deal, and the Boogie Nights actor struggled to find work.
Two years after the ordeal, he landed a leading role in Gunsmoke, one of the top shows in the country at the time. And the rest, as we say, is history. Although Reynolds never really forgave McGavin for his actions, he even went so far as to remark that he thought McGavin was going to hell.
