Donald Sutherland’s “really dumb” decision to turn down a 1972 masterpiece: “I regret that”
This isn’t supposed to be a slight, but having amassed around 200 credits in his career, Donald Sutherland didn’t seem like the kind of actor who’d say no to anything.
Whether it was stage, screen, or television, Sutherland would show up almost anywhere in almost any sort of production. Many of them were forgettable, and plenty were outright awful, but one thing he could never be accused of was going through the motions, even if everything around him was rubbish.
For every Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Klute, Ordinary People, or Don’t Look Now, there was a Benefit of the Doubt, Shadow Conspiracy, Fool’s Gold, or Virus to go with it. Objectively, Sutherland made at least a dozen shit films, but you could never say that he was shit in them, which is something, at least.
Arguably one of the greatest actors never to be nominated for an Academy Award, as good as he was at his job, he never seemed to be the shrewdest or savviest businessman. He declined a percentage of the profits for lending support in Animal House in favour of an upfront salary, which he admitted cost him as much as $15 million when the comedy became a box office sensation.
As far as his decision-making goes, he was equally honest. “Oh my god, I’ve made so many bad decision,” he acknowledged in 2019. Some of them were professional and some of them were personal, but when it came to the parts he could have played and didn’t, one of them haunted him for the rest of his days.
He wasn’t the first actor to say no, and he wasn’t the biggest, either, with Marlon Brando and Charlton Heston both rejecting the offer before him, but Sutherland lived to rue the day he decided that playing Lewis Medlock in John Boorman’s 1972 classic, Deliverance, wasn’t for him.
“It’s embarrassing, because John Boorman is a brilliant filmmaker, and my reasons were all dumb,” he explained. “I didn’t want to be in a violent movie. Dumb, really dumb. And I regret that. But if I had made it, maybe my life would have gone somewhere else, and I wouldn’t have ended up in Saskatoon in 1971 and met my wife.”
A fair point; Deliverance was shot in Georgia from May to August in 1971, after which Burt Reynolds ended up becoming the biggest movie star of the decade. Had Sutherland played Medlock instead, his professional life could have spun off in a different direction, and he wouldn’t have met Francine Racette on the Canadian set of 1974’s Alien Thunder, so there was a pretty big silver lining.
Still, the fact that he still called it his most regrettable call almost 40 years after the fact underlines just how stupid he felt after rejecting Deliverance on the grounds of its violent content, and it’s not like he didn’t make a few violent movies himself.
