The 1997 movie Kurt Russell would only travel to on a private jet: “The Emperor with no clothes”
How rich is Kurt Russell? About as rich as you’d expect somebody with a six-decade acting career to be, but probably still a damn sight wealthier than you might think.
We mere mortals are accustomed to hearing about actors being paid obscene amounts of money, but since he’s never really been viewed as one of those perennial A-listers like Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, or even Arnold Schwarzenegger, Russell flies somewhat under the radar.
That said, with an estimated net worth of $100 million, never mind however much Goldie Hawn has tucked away for a rainy day, he’s far from short of a bob or two. He didn’t reach that level until the 1990s, though, and once he did, John Carpenter’s muse enjoyed the benefits that came with it.
Not that we’re suggesting that Russell was on the breadline before then, but when Stargate paid him the biggest fee of his career by far, when he pocketed $7 million, new doors suddenly swung open. He got at least $10 million for Escape from LA, another $7.5 million for Executive Decision, and set a world record with Paul WS Anderson’s Soldier by making the most amount of money for the least amount of words.
He was living the financial high life, to put it lightly, and when he signed on for Jonathan Mostow’s 1997 thriller, Breakdown, in addition to his now-customary millions of dollars, he secured himself some private air travel, too. It wasn’t entirely down to ego, right enough, but a promise he’d made to Hawn.
Some of the location shooting took place in California, and you’d hope he didn’t use the jet for that when he lives in Los Angeles, but Utah was a different story. Russell and Hawn agreed that whenever one of them was working, the other would be at home to look after the family, and since it was technically his turn, producer Dino De Laurentiis made the necessary arrangements.
“Flying him back and forth was the solution,” director Jonathan Mostow recalled. “So every night Kurt was home for dinner, he’d be back in his bed, and the following morning he’d fly to set in Utah or wherever and do his scenes, then he’d fly home again.” The downside was that it bumped up the budget, which made the sophomore filmmaker increasingly nervous.
“When it suddenly turned into a studio-sized film, with a big movie star, who was commuting to set every day from his house in Los Angeles by private jet, and I had this huge crew, I started to worry it was going to be the Emperor with no clothes,” Mostow admitted. “I feared that the film would come out, and audiences and critics would go, ‘What are you doing?'”
To be fair, when Breakdown only made $50 million from cinemas on a $36 million budget, his concerns weren’t invalid. Fortunately, like countless other Russell flicks, the fast-paced feature found a second life on home video and has long since taken its place among his many, many, many other cult favourites.
