‘The Hateful Eight’: Kurt Russell on the most challenging role of his career
Kurt Russell has taken many an onscreen beating in the line of movie star duty. In fact, most of his films involve him getting beaten to within an inch of his life and left for dead before he picks himself up off the floor and sends his enemies to an early grave. Being unkillable is kind of his brand at this point, so you can imagine that his bar for on-set suffering is pretty high.
Russell rose to prominence in the 1980s as the grizzled antihero Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. In The Thing, he played the lone survivor of a group of researchers in the Antarctic beset by a gooey, shapeshifting alien. In the ‘90s, he gave Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner a run for their money when he starred in and practically directed the hit western Tombstone.
The latter film was a harrowing experience, with Russell shouldering the burden of the entire production and ensuring that it made it to theatres despite strong headwinds. But while it may have been the hardest he’s ever worked on a film set, it didn’t necessarily stretch him as an actor as much as a more recent western did. Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2015, Russell revealed that starring in the ensemble cast in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight was one of the most challenging experiences of his acting career, and it had nothing to do with all the violence his character is subjected to.
“To take on my character wasn’t easy because of my real personality,” he said. “To be so bombastic, so rude and seriously confident required me to become this whole new person.”
In the film, Russell plays bounty hunter John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth, a state-sanctioned killer who is obsessed with bringing his criminals in alive to watch them hang. Though the actor struggled with the character’s brutality, Ruth wasn’t alone. Even by Tarantino’s standards, the amount of gore in The Hateful Eight is staggering, and Ruth gets as good as he gives until he’s unceremoniously shot in the chest while vomiting blood.
Just because the part was hard to play doesn’t mean it was miserable. In fact, Russell revelled in the opportunity, saying it was one of his first experiences working with great actors in a long time. “All I had to do was talk to them,” he said. “[W]ith some actors it’s like, ‘Come on, man, bring it.’ That’s not the problem acting with Michael Madsen or Jennifer Jason Leigh. You have to hold your own and do your thing with them, and that was exciting as hell.”
He clearly rose to the challenge because The Hateful Eight and Russell’s other 2015 western Bone Tomahawk marked something of a comeback for the star, who had spent the 2000s muddling through an uneven series of movies. Since then, he’s become a welcome face in a range of big-budget films, including the Guardians of the Galaxy and Fast and Furious franchises, as well as Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.
