The 1972 “distraction” that haunted Burt Reynolds for the rest of his days: “That’s the thing I would change”
Few actors experienced more regret in their careers than Burt Reynolds. Either that or he was the most honest about it, because the late star’s professional life was a series of life-changing what-ifs.
If anything, it’s remarkable that Reynolds spent so long as an A-lister and five consecutive years as the biggest box office draw in the United States, considering that he could have elevated himself several levels higher and secured a completely different kind of legacy based on the roles he turned down.
He turned down Jack Nicholson’s Academy Award-winning roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Terms of Endearment, knocked back Harrison Ford’s star-making gig as Han Solo, wasn’t interested in Richard Gere’s Pretty Woman part, couldn’t have cared less about playing John McClane in Die Hard, and was offered the chance to replace Sean Connery as James Bond.
That’s only the half of it, with Reynolds also rejecting Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia because he couldn’t stand his Boogie Nights director, he backed away from The Godfather because Marlon Brando hated his guts, and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* was declined in favour of Skullduggery, a film nobody even remembers existing, unless you’re a superfan of the moustachioed maverick.
Any one of those pictures could have sent him on a completely different trajectory, but by the early 1980s, Reynolds’ mainstream goose was cooked. He’d had a hell of a decade, though, and after making nothing but bad movies for the first ten years of his career, John Boorman’s Deliverance came along.
He called it the best movie he ever made, directed by the best filmmaker that he ever worked with, and, in his estimation, nothing ever came close to dislodging the backwoods nightmare as his pinnacle. And yet, the highest of highs was preceded by the lowest of lows.
In July 1972, Deliverance was released in cinemas to equal amounts of acclaim, fanfare, and controversy. In April, Reynolds spreadeagled himself in the pages of Cosmopolitan, and when asked to name the single biggest regret of his career four decades later, there was only one answer.
“I’d like to pretend it’s something other than posing naked for a Cosmopolitan centrefold in 1972, but that’s the thing I would change,” he acknowledged. “The magazine came out before the release of Deliverance, and I’m certain that it was a distraction from the movie.”
Reynolds had been known to suggest that getting his kit off for Cosmo had potentially thwarted an Academy Award nomination for his turn as Lewis Medlock, but we’ll never know for sure if that carried much water. On the other hand, what’s incontrovertible is that stripping down haunted him for the rest of his days.
