When Burt Reynolds almost played Batman: “I doubted I could bring it off”
Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na… Burt Reynolds! That’s the song we could have been singing for decades had the moustachioed mountain of machismo agreed to play one of the most iconic characters in pop culture, which wasn’t the first or last time he’d say no to a sure-fire winner.
Has any actor in history turned down as many legendary roles as Reynolds? Based on how popular the characters became, how successful the movies were, and how many awards the stars who did play them won, it’s incredibly doubtful, which is just one of many reasons why he peaked in the late 1970s.
It’s ludicrous how close Reynolds was to so many indelible figures, and he’s only got himself to blame. Who in their right mind doesn’t only reject Star Wars‘ Han Solo, James Bond, and Superman, but also Jack Nicholson’s Academy Award-winning turns in Terms of Endearment and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Die Hard‘s John McClane, Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Rosemary’s Baby, and Pretty Woman?
At some point, you’d think his agents would have a word in his ear and say, ‘You know what, Burt? Things have worked out pretty well for the other guy all the other times you’ve turned down these parts, so maybe say yes to this one’. Either that didn’t happen, or the offers simply stopped rolling in.
To be fair, it’s not as if the Smokey and the Bandit frontman was asked to headline Tim Burton’s Batman, because that would have been ridiculous. However, he might have given George Clooney a run for his money as the worst Bruce Wayne of all time had he agreed to headline the 1960s TV series, since his career wasn’t going swimmingly at the time.
When the show premiered in 1966, he’d recently wrapped Navajo Joe, which he called “so awful it was only shown in prisons and airplanes because nobody could leave.” His 50-episode stint as Gunsmoke‘s Quint Asper had also ended the previous year, so it’s not as if he was too booked and busy.
He didn’t fancy squeezing himself into a skin-tight costume and delivering one-liners cheesy enough to kill the lactose intolerant, though, and he didn’t regret it. “I backed away from the original Batman TV series because I doubted I could bring it off and didn’t think it was a star-making part,” he wrote in his memoir, But Enough About Me.
Most people would agree that the ‘Caped Crusader’ was a star-making part for the actor who played it, but Reynolds didn’t think so: “I wouldn’t have been nearly as good as Adam West, who was brilliant as Batman. But as it happened, I was right: Batman didn’t do much for his career.”
That’s not necessarily true; while West didn’t soar much higher than his kitschy superhero shenanigans, it was the gift that kept on giving, since he rode that Bat-shaped wave for the rest of his days. Ironically, the first time he ever played himself in a movie saw him as the leading man of a film-within-a-film, and who played the fictional flick’s stunt coordinator in 1978’s Hooper? None other than Burt Reynolds.
