When Freddy Krueger shot Burt Reynolds’ toupee off: “I was the guy that pulled the trigger”
While it might sound reductive to reduce a classically trained actor with a 50-year career across film, television, and theatre to a single character, Robert Englund would be the first person to admit that dining out on Freddy Krueger for the last four decades has been the gift that keeps on giving.
Most actors would kill for a signature role, and Englund bumped off a fair few fictional characters when Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street turned the sadistic striped jumper enthusiast into one of the genre’s most iconic figures long before the credits started rolling.
He’s starred in all but one of the nine films in the franchise, hosted all 44 episodes of the TV series Freddy’s Nightmares, reprised the part for another three shows, including The Simpsons, as well as two music videos and a video game, so it’s fair to say he’ll always be remembered as Freddy and nothing else.
Of course, before Craven cast him as the dream-dwelling terror, Englund was a working actor who popped up anywhere and everywhere their services were required, which included a villainous supporting gig in the 1975 Burt Reynolds thriller, Hustle.
It was a solid showcase for Englund, with the leading man riding high as one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, and having him play a dogged detective leading the investigation into the murder of a teenager played right into his strengths as a moustachioed man of action who always gets the job done.
The erstwhile Freddy didn’t have a huge part in the story, but he did get to fire a gun at Reynolds’ Phil Gaines, which left Englund fearing for his fledgling career when he almost made the unforgivable mistake of blasting the A-lister’s prized toupee clean off his head.
“There was a quarter-load or half-load of blank in the gun,” he told Yahoo. “Burt got behind the camera for me as a gentleman and a movie star, and I was standing just off-lens. There was enough of a load in the gun that it hit him; it looked like he had dandruff on his shoulders. And the front of his hairpiece went up.”
Understandably, exposing Reynolds’ little-seen scalp on set caused Englund’s heart to sink. “I thought, ‘I’m never working again! I’ve seen Burt without his hairpiece!” To make things worse, he was summoned to the actor’s trailer after the scene wrapped, making him believe he was about to get his marching orders.
Instead, Reynolds gave him a shot of whiskey and let him know it was already water under the bridge. “Burt could have said, ‘This kid will never work in this town again,'” he admitted. “But he knew it wasn’t my fault. [Robert] Aldrich glared at me afterwards, but I did exactly what he told me to do. I was the guy that pulled the trigger!”
It was common knowledge in industry circles that most of Reynolds’ hair wasn’t his own, but for Englund, who was making only his third appearance in a feature, almost shooting it into orbit like William Tell arrowing an apple left him terrified for his immediate future in the business, if not his life. Thankfully, it was forgotten in an instant.
