The movie that almost made Kurt Russell quit acting: “I think I’m out, man”
In Hollywood, retirement is a very flexible term. There’s no mandatory age for an actor to bow out of the business, and even those who claim they’re quitting the industry for good can be tempted into a comeback. Kurt Russell has never walked away despite his lengthy career, even though he seriously considered it once.
If anyone’s entitled to a break, then the king of the cult classic would be near the top of the list. After all, he made his feature debut in 1963’s It Happened at the World’s Fair and has been a ubiquitous presence onscreen ever since. He’s been acting for over 60 years, but the longest he’s ever gone without appearing in a movie or TV show is the period between 1998’s Soldier and 2001’s Three Thousand Miles to Graceland.
Clearly, Russell isn’t even interested in taking an extended break, never mind receding gracefully from the spotlight, but even veterans are susceptible to the odd existential crisis. Ironically, the breaking point was one of his most beloved roles, which is admittedly understandable when behind-the-scenes issues forced him to assume a position of power on the set he never envisioned when he signed on.
“There are times when you think, ‘I’m done’, but then something comes along,” he explained to Rolling Stone. “I’ll never forget it because it was an odd thing. I’d just finished doing Tombstone, which was a rough ride. Really tough. And I had a job immediately after that.”
Just three weeks after he’d dragged Tombstone across the finish line, Russell was dealing with spacetime anomalies and bountiful amounts of visual effects in Roland Emmerich’s Stargate. The movie turned out to be a hit, but the leading man was so unsure of the project that he poured his heart out to a peer and intimated it might be his last stand.
“I ran into Larry Fishburne, who I didn’t know but is someone I always appreciated,” he explained. “I was like, ‘I think I’m out, man’. And he was like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that. You’ve got a lot more to do, and a lot more to give. You can’t talk like that’. He spoke with this sense of honesty, and it was just from one actor to another, and it was a strange thing. He probably doesn’t know how influential he was in me continuing on.”
Russell’s career may well have ended three decades ago if it wasn’t for Fishburne, an even more impressive feat considering the two were virtual strangers. Jumping straight from a period-set western beset by production problems into an expensive and effects-heavy sci-fi blockbuster is enough to give any actor whiplash, and it was an experience so jarring for John Carpenter’s most famous collaborator that he was ready to call it quits.
