Burt Reynolds got tricked into assaulting one of his co-stars: “He tried to kick me in the nuts”
Everyone in Hollywood had known since the 1970s that Burt Reynolds had a bit of a temper, but that didn’t stop one director from refusing to let him in on the joke over 20 years later, which was almost very bad news for a co-star’s nether regions.
Most actors who reach the pinnacle of the profession tend to keep themselves in line, knowing full well that rocking the boat could cause them to fall overboard and drown in irrelevancy. Funnily enough, that happened to Reynolds eventually, and it was at least partially his own fault.
While there’s plenty to appreciate about a superstar who refuses to hold their tongue, Reynolds shitting all over so many of his movies, trashing several of the directors he worked with, and feuding with multiple colleagues did him no favours in the long run. He was the biggest star in the business in the late 1970s, but by the end of the following decade, he was virtually a has-been.
Even when he was brought in from the cold to deliver the greatest performance of his career in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, earning his only Academy Award nomination in the process, Reynolds couldn’t stop himself from butting heads with the fresh-faced filmmaker and generally being a belligerent presence on set.
Anderson has never been known as a mischievous figure, but he decided to have some fun at Reynolds’ expense by instructing everyone involved in a scene, except him, to continue performing beyond the end of the scripted dialogue, specifically telling Thomas Jane to “get in his face” and start messing with him.
“He thought the take was over and I was some punk actor getting in his face,” Jane recalled. “Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t tell Burt Reynolds that we were doing a little improvisation after the scene was over!” During an appearance on The Rich Eisen Show, he detailed how it almost went completely off the rails.
When Reynolds had finished the scene, or so he thought, Jane “started fucking with him.” Utterly oblivious to the fact that Anderson was still rolling the cameras, the latter admitted he was “taunting” the veteran, which didn’t go down too well. “He was just like, ‘What is going on? Who are you, you fucking asshole?’ Instantly, the guy just goes berserk.”
With Anderson probably trying his best not to burst out laughing, the bemused Reynolds made a move on Jane, grabbed him, and as the actor remembers, “He tried to kick me in the nuts.” Fortunately, the Smokey and the Bandit legend realised he was the victim of an on-set prank before he booted Jane in the baws, which would have technically left him wide open to a lawsuit if he were feeling so inclined.
It didn’t take long for the tensions to cool down, though, with Jane revealing that Reynolds “gave me a bottle of champagne in my trailer the next day, and he actually turned out to be really cool,” which wasn’t an opinion shared by every member of the Boogie Nights ensemble, or the film’s director, for that matter.
