The troubled Burt Reynolds role almost played by Michael Caine: “He made the part very different”
Burt Reynolds made an enemy or two during his career, but he would have avoided what became the most heated feud of his professional life had scheduling conflicts not turned him into a last-minute replacement for a part that was supposed to be played by Michael Caine.
Obviously, they’re two very different types of actors. Reynolds was the moustachioed embodiment of all-American machismo who became the most bankable star in Hollywood by headlining a succession of high-octane action comedies, with Caine almost his polar opposite.
The working-class lad done good had crossed the Atlantic in the mid-1960s to become one of the United Kingdom’s finest acting exports, relying on his dramatic abilities and stage-honed professionalism to rise to the top of the industry, a far cry from the crowd-pleasing genre flicks and charismatic rogues Reynolds had used to further his own ascent.
There can’t have been many instances where the two were in the running for the same role, but on the one occasion where it did happen, it would have saved Reynolds an awful lot of hassle. He had his issues with Marlon Brando and Paul Thomas Anderson, but none of his feuds were as heated as the one he became embroiled with alongside his Switching Channels co-star Kathleen Turner.
The two absolutely hated each other on set, with Reynolds driving Turner to tears, and he openly referred to her as the worst person he’d ever worked with as part of a back-and-forth battle of speaking negatively about each other that raged on for years. If it wasn’t for the worst film of Caine’s career, all of that could have been avoided.
He’d been lined up as Sully in Ted Kotcheff’s comedy, only for production to overrun on the notorious film that saw Caine miss the chance to collect his first Academy Award in person. As Switching Channels co-star Christopher Reeve recalled in a 1988 interview with Pop Culture Classics, it threw the whole cast and crew for a loop.
“I’d never been faced with that situation before,” he explained. “We’d shot two weeks of film thinking that Michael Caine was coming any day. But I did feel that Burt did an amazingly smooth job of jumping into a difficult situation. And he showed a lot of grace under pressure. He worked really hard. He made the part very different than Michael Caine would have.”
Hollywood history is littered with dominoes falling in unexpected directions, and Switching Channels makes for one of the more curious cases. If it weren’t for Jaws: The Revenge going over schedule, Caine would have had the time to turn up at the Oscars to claim his prize before moving on to filming opposite Turner, which would have saved her the misery of working with Reynolds and avoided the pair firing barbs at each other for the next four decades.
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