The one director Burt Reynolds regretted rejecting: “It broke his heart and I’ve always felt bad”
It’s never the nicest thing to say about any actor, especially one who became a bigger star than most, but regret was one of the defining themes of Burt Reynolds‘ career.
Sure, he ruled the roost as the first person to ever spend five consecutive years as the American box office’s top-drawing name, but he never reached those heights again. He was one of his era’s marquee leading men, but once he slipped off that perch, he never came close to regaining it.
Reynolds knows exactly where he went wrong, too, admitting that his decision to turn down Jack Nicholson’s Academy Award-winning part in James L Brooks’ Terms of Endearment to make Stroker Ace instead was the point of no return, and besides a fleeting comeback after Boogie Nights, he was right.
Had he accepted even half of the iconic, acclaimed, or award-winning roles that had been offered to him when he was at his peak, then it would have been a completely different story. Instead, Reynolds spent the last four decades of his professional life working solidly without ever recapturing those former glories.
If he owed everything he fleetingly had to one film, though, it was Deliverance. Reynolds was almost 15 years into his career before he was cast in the classic backwoods thriller, and he knew it was the first good picture he’d ever made. For the next 50 years, it remained his personal favourite, and none of it would have happened without John Boorman.
He also called the filmmaker the best director he’d ever worked with, but when the chance for them to reunite materialised, Reynolds turned him down. Making a second film with the person who’d helmed the movie the actor called the finest thing he’d ever been in was an opportunity he shouldn’t have been able to resist, but those pesky scheduling conflicts got in the way.
For better or worse, one of the defining images of Sean Connery’s career was the sight of him parading around in Zardoz with a beefy moustache, ludicrous ponytail, bright red underpants, and matching bullet belt suspenders. As traumatising as it may be to some people, it’s easy to imagine Reynolds sporting the same duds, and that was the plan, with his casting announced in April 1973.
Unfortunately, he fell ill before shooting started a month later, leaving him no choice but to drop out. “I also regret not doing Zardoz,” he lamented to Empire. “I got sick and wound up having to tell John Boorman I couldn’t do it. It broke his heart, and I’ve always felt bad about it.”
Meanwhile, Connery was struggling to reinvent himself after permanently retiring his iteration of James Bond after Diamonds Are Forever, or, as Boorman put it, “he wasn’t getting any jobs,” so he was brought in as a last-minute replacement to traipse around a ravaged post-apocalyptic world in his skivvies. To add even more heartbreak, Reynolds never worked with his Deliverance director again, meaning he missed out on his one and only chance.
