Burt Reynolds was almost killed on the set of his only fantasy movie: “It was brutal”
Despite spending five consecutive years as the most bankable star in Hollywood at the peak of his powers, Burt Reynolds was the first to admit that he made a lot more bad movies than good ones.
The actor had no issues admitting that John Boorman’s Deliverance was the first picture he made that wasn’t crap, which was a damning indictment when it was released 11 years and 11 films into his big-screen career, which doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
His time at the top of the A-list was relatively short-lived, though, with Reynolds pinpointing 1983’s Stroker Ace as the exact moment his heyday was over, which hurt even more because he’d turned down Jack Nicholson’s Academy Award-winning role in Terms of Endearment to make it.
Boogie Nights aside, Reynolds’ filmography from the mid-1980s onward wasn’t overflowing with greatness, but one notable absentee remained. He’d done drama, action, comedy, literary adaptations, reboots, remakes, and almost everything else under the sun, but he’d never dipped his toes into fantasy.
In a way, it made perfect sense. There are just some actors who’d never come across as believable in a far-flung and fantastical world full of magic and monsters, with Reynolds definitely among them. He looked very much like a modern-day ageing American dude, but he took the plunge eventually and almost died for his troubles.
Seeing as it hailed from one of cinema’s worst-ever directors, there’s only one conceivable reason why established names like Reynolds, Jason Statham, and Ray Liotta agreed to star in Uwe Boll’s steaming cinematic turd, 2007’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale: money.
Funnily enough, a filmmaker who built his career on making shite delivered yet another massive pile of it, with the film tanking at the box office, getting eviscerated by critics, and somehow still not being Boll’s worst crime against cinema. As the barrel-scraping auteur explained to Emmanuel Levy, roping in so many stars almost came at a perilous cost.
The conditions were so hot, and the costumes so heavy, that Reynolds almost plunged to his death from a great height as the cast and crew suffered for their awful, awful art. “We did everything we could to get water to them,” Boll said. “Sometimes you would see them lying on the ground and think they were resting, but they had actually passed out. He was wearing metal and leather armour, and he fell from a platform. Luckily, the stunt guys caught him. It was brutal.”
It says a lot about his choice of roles that In the Name of the King might not even be the worst movie Reynolds appeared in, but it’s up there at the very least. His first foray into full-blown fantasy almost killed him, and it might not be a coincidence that he never returned to the genre again.
Sure, it wasn’t the first time he’d almost died on set, but it would have been cruelly ironic were he to finally tick it off his bucket list more than 45 years into his career and have it be the literal death of him.
