The character Kurt Russell wrote a 200-page backstory for: “As if he were a method actor”
Kurt Russell has played some wonderful characters across his career.
One’s mind immediately wanders to the work he’s done with John Carpenter, which has yielded some of the greatest movie badasses ever seen. He’s played Elvis Presley and Wyatt Earp, as well as countless other fantastical fictional creations. When Marvel needed somebody to play Ego, a literal God that took the form of a living planet, they knew exactly who to call.
In recent years, he’s taken on the form of another beloved figure – perhaps the most recognisable character in the world. In 2018, he stepped into the big red shoes of Santa Claus in the movie The Christmas Chronicles. Starring alongside his real-life squeeze Goldie Hawn, Russell’s version of jolly ol’ Saint Nick encounters two meddlesome children who accidentally cause his slay to crash. Instead of smacking the two brats senseless (which he was well within his rights to do), Santa joins them in tracking the gifts down before the big day arrives.
Two years later, Russell returned to the North Pole for The Christmas Chronicles 2. In an interview with Business Insider, Chris Columbus, who directed both instalments of the franchise, revealed that his star went to some extreme lengths to make sure the second instalment was even better than the first.
“Kurt takes this role incredibly seriously,” the director revealed. “It may sound silly to some people, but Kurt approaches Santa Claus as if he were a method actor. Kurt wrote probably 175 to 200 written pages about Santa’s history. He just went and did that on his own. He’s just committed to the role in such a major way.”
As Columbus said, this might seem like overkill, because surely everybody knows how to play Santa – you grow a beard, you do the ‘ho ho hos’, and you’re nice to everyone, but that’s precisely the reason why the role demands to be taken seriously, and so many people have given legendary performances as Father Christmas. It’s a stacked field that features the likes of Richard Attenborough, Ed Asner, and, lest we forget, Billy Bob Thornton, and if you want to stand out among this crowd, then you’ve got to put the work in.
Did all this loving labour pay off? Sort of, because The Christmas Chronicles 2 was the most-watched movie on Netflix the week of its release, with the streamer claiming that it was viewed 61million times during its first month, but from a critical standpoint, it failed to blow people away, as reviewers found the story to be derivative and lacking the novelty of the original, but Russell and Hawn’s performances were praised. Clearly, those 200 pages weren’t completely wasted.
Russell has never been one for method acting. It’s never come up in any interviews about some of his most famous parts, and he never brags about the work he puts in behind the scenes.
The fact that he went to these lengths to play such a beloved character – and that it was his director who revealed it – shows just what kind of guy he is.
