Burt Reynolds names the best movies of his career: “I was only in two acclaimed films”
Movie stardom and critical acclaim have never been mutually exclusive, with Burt Reynolds self-aware enough to know that he didn’t become the biggest draw in the business by testing his limits as an actor in a string of prestigious awards-baiting dramas.
It’s always been the case in Hollywood that the finest thespians rarely bring in big bucks at the box office and vice versa, and the number of stars who can do both is increasingly short. Dwayne Johnson is the highest-paid actor on the planet, but he’s nowhere close to being the best actor.
Similarly, Daniel Day-Lewis has three Academy Award wins for ‘Best Actor’, but he’s not the kind of guy the studios will lean on to open an expensive film based on their name alone. Of course, the likes of Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington have found the middle ground, but Reynolds struggled to land in it.
It was a crossroads that defined his career; even when his star power was at its peak, Reynolds wrestled with the two sides of celebrity. Did he continue doing what audiences wanted to see and reap the financial rewards, or did he try to step outside his comfort zone in search of accolades and adulation?
He ended up leaning much heavier towards the former than the latter, which is one of just many reasons why he’ll always rue the day he missed out on Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning turns in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Terms of Endearment. By his own admission, Reynolds was a long way into his career before he even made a good film, and the next 50 years didn’t throw up too many winners, either.
He had no issues confessing the first decade and a half of his filmography was comprised almost entirely of miss after miss, just like he knew better than anyone how important John Boorman’s Deliverance was to changing everything. Reynolds has been in a lot of popular movies, but from his standpoint, there weren’t many that he’d be willing to back to the hilt.
“You could almost say my only acclaimed film,” he mused to NPR of Deliverance. “But I was only in, I think, maybe two really acclaimed films, Deliverance and The Longest Yard and maybe Starting Over, because it was nominated for an Emmy award, the picture was. But Deliverance was an extraordinary film in the sense that it was these four actors; I don’t think you could get four actors who would do what we did.”
Reynolds made over 50 films, but he doesn’t think any of them were worthy of acclaim except those three. The glaring omission is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, which was very much a rapturously received movie. Then again, considering he hated the director and refused to work with him again, it makes sense that he’d conveniently leave that one out of the running.
