“I didn’t feel that way”: the life-changing movie Kurt Russell didn’t “really want to do”
While it would be nice for every actor only to play parts they immediately fall in love with, that’s not how things work. They need to go where the jobs and money are, with Kurt Russell confessing that he wasn’t overly enamoured with a movie that ended up changing his life and career forever.
It becomes increasingly ironic the more you think about it, though, because with the benefit of hindsight, it was a perfect storm of circumstance. It came at a pivotal moment in Russell’s professional life, and it became the exact moment where he planted one foot in his past and the other in his future.
Having been acting since the early 1960s, it was understandable that he was having second thoughts about committing himself to acting for good. In fact, he tried to pivot away from performing and towards baseball, but an injury scuppered any chances he had of permanently swapping cinema for sports.
By the end of the following decade, Russell was at a crossroads. He’d aged out of the kind of parts he played during his Disney days, and with his 30th birthday looming over the horizon, his next steps were crucial. Plenty of child stars have struggled to attain longevity as they get older, and he found the right project at the right time.
It would be reasonable to assume that because he shared the screen with Elvis Presley in his first film, played him three decades later in Forrest Gump, and is a self-proclaimed fan of ‘The King’, Russell would jump at the opportunity to headline the 1979 made-for-television movie, Elvis, but that wasn’t the case.
“I have to say that every once in a while, you get the opportunity to do something you really want to do. I didn’t feel that way about Elvis,” he admitted at the Cape Town Film Festival. “But I knew it was a wonderful opportunity, and I knew he could do it.” However, the best was still to come, with the film’s director defining the next ten years of Russell’s career.
Not only was he playing the icon he’d worked with in his screen debut, but Elvis was helmed by John Carpenter, the filmmaker fresh from the game-changing success of Halloween, who’d repeatedly reunite with the actor on Escape from New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China within the next seven years.
“I was cast in that project before John was brought on board. That’s where we met,” the star explained. “We learned a language very quickly with each other. I went away to Australia and came back, and we did say, ‘Let’s do this again, but with something that’s completely ours,'” which became the start of a beautiful relationship.
Beyond that, Elvis solidified Russell’s credentials as a genuinely talented actor who shouldn’t have too many issues navigating the often treacherous leap from fresh-faced studio favourite to a leading man, with his Primetime Emmy nomination for ‘Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie’ the first major awards season recognition he’d ever received, which isn’t bad going for something he wasn’t exactly willing to move heaven and earth to make.
