The only roles Burt Reynolds had “nightmares” about turning down: “Look what happened”
Few actors turned down as many iconic or award-winning roles as Burt Reynolds, and as much as he regretted many of those decisions, he only singled out three as having kept him up at night.
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the beacon of all-American machismo was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and he could have been even bigger for a whole lot longer if he hadn’t kept shooting himself in the foot by rejecting parts in successful movies to make shitty ones instead.
To wit, he knocked back Jack Nicholson’s Academy Award-winning turn as Garrett Breedlove in James L Brooks’ Terms of Endearment to make Stroker Ace instead, the film he singled out as the beginning of the end for his tenure as an A-lister, and that’s just the tip of the heavily moustachioed iceberg.
He turned down Richard Gere’s gig in Pretty Woman, which earned north of $460 million at the box office and became the highest-grossing R-rated release in cinema history, not to mention a rom-com classic. What was his big film of 1990? Modern Love, a picture that barely anyone remembers even exists.
Reynolds was too scared to lobby for Harrison Ford’s Oscar-nominated turn in Witness and spent his 1985 directing Stick, pushed hard for Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning outing as Randall P McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and baulked at the prospect of reuniting with Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia because he hated his Boogie Nights director’s guts.
That’s an awful lot of what-ifs for one man, and it’s easy to understand why Reynolds had so many regrets. And yet, there was only a trio of them that stuck in his mind as the ones that haunted his dreams, and since they would have earned him millions upon millions of dollars in films that earned billions upon billions of dollars at the box office, he didn’t really need to explain it.
“I have nightmares about some of the movies I’ve made and some of those I turned down,” he admitted. “Did you know I was asked to play James Bond and I turned it down?” Yes, we did, Burt, everyone knows that you turned down James Bond, but it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that, was it?
“I was offered John McClane in Die Hard, but didn’t really like it, so Bruce Willis took it,” he added, with the lament palpably seeping out of his every pore. “And look what happened.” What happened was that the Moonlighting star nabbed a $5 million paycheque for his first major leading role in a movie that turned out to be one of the greatest action flicks ever made, and the first in a five-film franchise.
“I was also asked to be Han Solo in Star Wars: A New Hope,” Reynolds continued. “I am famous for not being famous in those roles. Bond hurts the most.” As you can infer, the Smokey and the Bandit gas-pedaller turned down many, many high-profile films, but those three stung him the hardest.
