The co-star who refused to share any scenes with Burt Reynolds: “I will not be on the same stage”
Throughout his career, Burt Reynolds famously feuded with several actors and directors. However, only once did a simmering disdain reach such a point that a co-star refused to be on the set at the same time as him, which presented a logistical challenge, seeing as they shared plenty of scenes together.
By his own admission, he could be a bit of a dickhead on occasion. Reynolds was a major star and one of Hollywood’s marquee leading men at his peak, but he also spoke his mind without a care in the world for who he pissed off, which caused his enemies list to gradually increase the longer he stayed in the spotlight.
Whether it was Kathleen Turner, Paul Thomas Anderson, John G Avildsen, Darren McGavin, or Marlon Brando, the moustachioed embodiment of middle-American machismo didn’t always play nice. That said, he claimed the shoe was on the other foot when he butted heads with Raquel Welch in 1969’s 100 Rifles.
The only one of Reynolds’ films that Quentin Tarantino actively despises, the actor plays a bank robber being pursued by Jim Brown’s lawman. Once he and his nemesis both end up in the same Mexican prison, the arrival of Welch’s local freedom fighter sets the unlikely trio on a new path.
“Jim and I were fast friends, but Raquel is another story,” Reynolds wrote in his memoir, But Enough About Me. “During production, she said things to me that weren’t particularly nice, and I said things back to her that were even worse, so we didn’t part friends.”
Despite their initial frostiness, they reunited three years later for the action comedy Fuzz, where the call sheet only intensified the bad blood. “I had top billing, which pissed her off,” Reynolds said. “She told the producer, ‘I will not work with him. I will not be on the same stage.'”
Welch was a woman of her word, placing her opposite number into the bizarre situation of shooting all of their scenes together with her stunt double. When he’d finished his scenes, “the guard would pick up the phone and say, ‘He’s leaving now,'” and then she’d turn up and do the same with his double.
“If you see the movie, it’s never us together,” he revealed. “It was the only time I’ve ever had to work like that.” Welch was only required to spend nine days in total on the set and earned $100,000 for her troubles, and she managed to do that without ever looking Reynolds directly in the eye.
Remarkably, audiences didn’t seem to notice that the duo had never crossed paths, with Fuzz laying down a mantle that Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel happily picked up when the chrome-domed meatheads fell out on the Fast & Furious franchise and flat-out refused to be in the same scene at the same time.
