The exact moment Burt Reynolds realised he’d ruined his career: “That’s where I lost them”
For a while, movie stars didn’t come much bigger than Burt Reynolds, who ruled the roost as one of Hollywood’s most bankable drawing cards from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
All good things must come to an end, though, and the actor was the architect of his own destruction. Not on purpose, of course, but he was self-aware enough to realise that a string of bad choices and even worse movies had eroded his star power to such an extent that he was staring irrelevancy in the face.
What must have stung even more is that it was entirely avoidable. For instance, had Reynolds accepted any of the offers that came his way that he ultimately rejected, including Star Wars‘ Han Solo, Richard Gere’s Pretty Woman role, or stepping in as Sean Connery’s James Bond replacement, he wouldn’t have ended up circling the straight-to-video drain by the mid-1990s.
Reynolds was caught in a perpetual crisis of confidence, even during his most successful years: audiences were turning up in droves to see his latest movies based entirely on his name value and popularity, which meant that he was either too afraid to leave his comfort zone or high-profile directors were hesitant to drag him out of it, and sometimes, it was a combination of both.
If there was one moment he realised his days as a mainstream leading man were over, he knew exactly when it was. James L Brooks had written the part of Garrett Breedlove in Terms of Endearment with Reynolds in mind, but he knocked it back in favour of reuniting with his Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run, and Hooper director, Hal Needham, to make Stroker Ace instead.
“That’s where I lost them,” he regretfully admitted to the Los Angeles Times. While it’s commendable that Reynolds prioritised his personal and professional relationship with Needham over Terms of Endearment, the film landed five Razzie nominations and bombed at the box office, whereas Jack Nicholson won an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for playing Breedlove.
“When it came time to choose between Terms and Stroker, I chose the latter because I felt I owed Hal more than I did Jim,” he explained. “Nobody told me I could have probably done Terms and Universal would have waited until I was finished before making Stroker.”
The rest of his decade was characterised by flops, with The Man Who Loved Women, City Heat, Stick, Uphill All the Way, and Malone rubbing further salt into the wound. When Stroker tanked and took a critical pasting, it shifted the audience’s perception of Reynolds. From then on, he never recaptured his lofty position atop the A-list, and he knew it was entirely his own doing.
He continued working solidly for the next 30 years, but beyond an Oscar-nominated and career-best turn in Boogie Nights, Reynolds was considered a relic of a bygone era.
