The performance Burt Reynolds admitted he deserved to be criticised for: “I never liked it”
If you want a fascinating insight into the conflicted mind of a movie star at the top of their game, try reading any Burt Reynolds interview from the 1970s and ’80s. At this time, Reynolds was legitimately the biggest draw in Hollywood, but his disarming honesty in interview situations meant he often revealed an inferiority complex about his acting and its critical response.
Indeed, if Reynolds was to be believed in that era, he simultaneously had no regrets about making any of the blockbusting action comedies he was known for, but also didn’t think any of them were good movies, either. He desperately wanted to be taken “seriously” by critics as an actor because he put a lot of work into his career. Still, at the same time, he routinely made movies critics were always likely to hate because he didn’t want to lose his appeal to mass audiences. These driving forces were usually at odds, and Reynolds knew it.
Fascinatingly, Reynolds believed critics treated his pictures differently from those made by other top actors of the day, leading to an unfair double standard. He pointed to the characters he played in movies like Paternity (“a sexist jerk”), Smokey and the Bandit (“a showoff” without “one redeeming feature”), and The End (“a selfish crybaby”). To him, these were risky roles to tackle, but he claimed, “Because it’s me playing the part, people say, ‘It’s just old Burt doing what everybody wants him to do.’ If it had been Jack Nicholson, they would have raved about how courageous he was to play a conceited son of a bitch.”
Within this push and pull between commercial success and artistic freedom, Reynolds sometimes made it sound like critics victimised him, yet he also craved their approval. So, if the critical community ripped apart one of his films, sometimes he’d defend that movie to the death, but on other occasions, he’d admit it was a money gig that he always thought was subpar. In fact, when it came to badmouthing his own movies, it didn’t matter if the film was one of his most beloved hits or a picture that sank without a trace: Reynolds would be honest about it.
While some criticism stung Reynolds so deeply he held onto it for years, other times it was like water off a duck’s back. Case in point: The Cannonball Run, a car-centric action comedy that spawned a sequel in ’83, also starring Reynolds. “It’s very strange about criticism,” Reynolds admitted to The New York Times in ’81. “It probably has something to do with how much of me is in the project.”
Astonishingly, Reynolds admitted that Cannonball Run, which was released only six months before the interview to great fanfare and enormous box office, was a film he starred in “for all the wrong reasons.” He revealed he only agreed to make the film to help out his good friend Hal Needham, who had also directed him in Hooper and the similarly automobile-themed Smokey and the Bandit, and because he was offered an eye-watering payday. “I never liked it,” Reynolds confessed, but added that he “felt it was immoral to turn down that kind of money.”
Therefore, in Reynolds’ view, it was no real skin off his nose when critics came for The Cannonball Run. He claimed he didn’t care, for example, that Roger Ebert dubbed it “an abdication of artistic responsibility at the lowest possible level of ambition” because he “rather deserved” the “disparaging remarks.” To Reynolds, this one was purely a money gig, and he admitted, “I suppose I sold out, so I couldn’t really object to what people wrote about me.”
Ultimately, was this really how Reynolds felt? Or was he just trying to soften the blow from another critical flaying? Only the conflicted star himself knew the answer to that question.
