The director who called Kurt Russell the single best actor in Hollywood: “He’s unparalleled”
If you asked 100 people to guess which director called Kurt Russell the single finest actor that Hollywood had at its disposal, at least 99 of them would wager that it was John Carpenter. However, it wasn’t.
Not that the star’s most famous directorial muse thinks he’s shite, but the master of the macabre and brains behind countless cult classics didn’t place his favourite collaborator on a pedestal of his own. He did call him a genius, though, but not the cream of the industry’s performative crop.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but Russell isn’t part of those conversations. Is he one of modern cinema’s most iconic leading men? Of course. Is he a living legend? Absolutely. Has he enjoyed the sort of longevity that most actors would kill for? Undoubtedly, but he’s never been viewed as a top-tier thespian.
He’s one of the best at what he does, and he’s hardly lacking in the dramatic department, but a solitary nomination apiece from the Golden Globes and Primetime Emmys are the sum of his awards season recognition, and the most recent of those two nods came in 1983.
Yes, a bulging trophy cabinet isn’t the be-all and end-all of what defines a great actor, but in a world where Daniel Day-Lewis, Jack Nicholson, Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and the rest of the usual suspects are vying for the title of greatest living actor, Russell doesn’t get a look-in.
That said, Jonathan Mostow would disagree, having worked with the erstwhile Snake Plissken on 1997’s Breakdown. He’d planned on directing Russell long before then, developing an early iteration of The Game that would have seen him playing the Nick Van Orton role that eventually went to Michael Douglas under David Fincher’s stewardship, but it wasn’t to be.
When he finally got his chance, he wasn’t going to let it slip through his fingers. “He was the guy I wanted,” Mostow told Vulture. “When we got him, I thought, ‘If I don’t screw this up some other way, it’s going to work. Because he’s unparalleled as a film actor and terribly underappreciated for his ability to convey what he’s thinking without a word of dialogue.”
Is Russell “terribly underappreciated”? Perhaps. Is he “unparalleled as a film actor”? That’s up for debate, but Mostow is adamant. “A lot of people forget he was in the Mike Nichols film Silkwood, and he co-starred with Meryl Streep and Cher,” the filmmaker elaborated. “There’s a wonderful scene where they’re flying.”
In that scene, almost every word is spoken between Streep and Cher, with Russell sitting in the middle, which Mostow used as the example to underline his brilliance. “All he can do is follow the conversation, and you watch him,” he offered. “You get exactly what he’s thinking. That’s just an incredible gift to audiences and to a filmmaker.”
Kurt Russell is awesome, everyone knows that, but one director thinks he’s the best in the business.
