The only movies Burt Reynolds refused to watch: “It will be a long time before I’m able”
Being a working thespian doesn’t obligate an actor to become a lifelong cinephile, and it’s understandable that someone who makes movies for a living doesn’t necessarily want to spend their free time watching the ones made by other people. However, Burt Reynolds had a very specific set of rules for the films he refused to see.
His reasons were about as part apart as it gets, with the star shunning two stone-cold and storied classics for personal reasons, while the rest were down to a director he could never wrap his head around. Reynolds never came across as a true student of celluloid, to be fair, but he definitely knew how to find success in his chosen vocation.
That said, despite spending five consecutive years as the most bankable leading man in Hollywood and making millions of dollars along the way, his career could have turned out completely differently had he accepted just one of the countless major roles that were offered his way.
There are alternate realities out there where Reynolds starred in everything from The Godfather and Richard Donner’s Superman to the James Bond franchise and George Lucas’ Star Wars, which would have cemented him as even more of an icon. He didn’t regret too many of the ones that got away, although two of them stung more than the rest.
Reynolds had to sit idly by and watch Jack Nicholson win an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with the character of Randall P McMurphy, one he’d lobbied hard to play. Over a decade later, he had to watch the same guy collect another Oscar, this time in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category, for Terms of Endearment, which he’d turned down.
Needless to say, missing out on two roles that ended up being played by the same actor who went on to win Oscars both times has got to sting, leaving Reynolds so dismayed that he never had any interest in watching either to compare what he could have brought to the table against Nicholson.
“I know how good the roles are, and I know how brilliant Jack is,” he said, per The Wrap. “It will be a long time before I’ll be able to watch them.” As it turned out, he never got around to seeing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Terms of Endearment, which is fair enough.
Reynolds had a personal stake in both of those productions and ended up with nothing to show for it, making his avoidance of those two awards-laden titles completely understandable. On the other hand, he also disavowed Ingmar Bergman’s entire filmography simply because he couldn’t have cared less about the Swedish maestro’s signature style of elegiac drama.
In fact, Reynolds even said he’d “rather be shot in the leg than watch an Ingmar Bergman picture,” which seems a little over the top when the filmmaker was responsible for several seminal films.
