The career-defining role nobody wanted Robert Redford to play: “They tried everything to keep me out”
The mere notion that any movie studio would not want Robert Redford in their movie is vaguely insane these days, given the titanic figure the actor and Sundance Film Festival founder became in American cinema. However, in his early days of nascent stardom, that’s precisely what happened with one of his films. Amazingly, the movie in question featured arguably the most defining role in Redford’s career, and the studio only relented when his older, equally iconic co-star went to bat for him.
When screenwriter William Goldman – often described as the best writer in Hollywood history – sent Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid around town in the late 1960s, only one studio showed interest in optioning the screenplay. According to Sean Egan’s William Goldman: The Reluctant Storyteller, that studio had one major alteration it wanted made to the script. You see, in the script, Butch and Sundance flee the US to Bolivia after a succession of train robberies, and this incensed the head of the studio. When Goldman told him that’s what happened in real life, he spat, “I don’t give a shit. All I know is John Wayne, don’t run away.”
In response to this, Goldman regrouped and made some light changes but kept the Bolivia storyline intact. Suddenly, every studio wanted the script, and soon, two of the industry’s biggest A-listers attached themselves: Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. As he tended to do, though, McQueen had some disagreements with his equally famous co-star and exited the project, leaving the role of Harry Longabaugh, the “Sundance Kid”, up for grabs.
Robert Redford soon emerged as the best choice for the role, having solidified his rise up the Hollywood ranks in recent years with The Chase and Barefoot in the Park. However, he was significantly younger than Newman and hadn’t yet achieved bankable leading man status, which made 20th Century Fox nervous.
In 2013, Redford told NPR, “When it first came up, because of the age difference between Paul and I, which was like 12, 13 years – and he was really well-known, and I was not well-known – the studio did not want me.”
In fact, he claimed, “They tried everything to keep me out of the film.”
To the studio’s chagrin, though, Newman had connected with Redford when director George Roy Hill first introduced them in New York City in ’68. Redford reminisced, “When I met Paul, he was very generous, and he said, ‘I’ll do it with Redford.’ I never forgot that.” Newman, Hill, and Goldman all subsequently told Fox they wanted Redford in the film, and the studio had little choice but to agree.
In that period, Newman was in a very privileged position in Hollywood, but his leading man stardom was also precarious, especially if he angered a major studio. Redford marvelled, “I don’t know how many people would have done that; they would have listened to their agents or the studio powers.”
Perhaps as a way of asserting its dominance after being forced into casting him, Fox lowballed Redford in his contract. The rising star signed it anyway, though, as he knew that it was a superb role that had star-making potential. In 1980, he told Michael Parkinson, “I practically did it for nothing, that film, because I just felt comfortable playing that role.”
Over the course of the shoot, Redford and Newman became fast friends, bonding over their shared start in theatre and live television. They would stay friends right up until Newman died in 2008. Redford told Time magazine that he last saw Newman a few months before he passed, and their bond was so strong that neither man felt the need to discuss what they both knew was about to happen.
Instead, Redford said, “We talked about what was on our minds: the election, politics, what needed to be done. Ours was a relationship that didn’t need a lot of words.”
