The ‘Rambo’ role Burt Reynolds was desperate to play: “You’re too expensive and too famous”
One of the most unfortunate recurring themes of Burt Reynolds‘ career was the number of classic movies, awards season favourites, and box office phenomenons he turned down, and he conspired to price himself out of another one when Sylvester Stallone launched the Rambo franchise.
In the late 1970s, Reynolds was on top of the world. After finally landing his breakthrough role in John Boorman’s Deliverance after a decade of making shitty films, which are his words, not ours, he capitalised on his newfound fame to become the single biggest box office attraction in American cinema.
The moustachioed actor ruled the roost for five consecutive years, and he was at the peak of his powers when a feature-length adaptation of David Morrell’s First Blood entered development. Today, it’s regarded as an action classic and one of Stallone’s best, but nobody felt that way when it entered production.
Almost every notable leading man in Hollywood had passed on the part of John Rambo, and even when Stallone signed on, he was convinced it would ruin his career. Obviously, it didn’t, and it only strengthened his claim as the blockbuster arena’s biggest draw, even after it took two attempts to cast someone as the protagonist’s only ally, army colonel Sam Trautman.
Kirk Douglas was initially hired, only for Stallone and director Ted Kotcheff to realise that he was all wrong. Once he was given his marching orders, Richard Crenna was drafted in, and he became a staple of the original trilogy. Following Reynolds’ death in 2018, Stallone remembered how the Smokey and the Bandit headliner kept reminding him he should have been given the gig instead.
“I remember him back in 1979, he always reminded me that I should’ve cast him as Colonel Trautman in First Blood,” he recalled. “I said, ‘That’s impossible, because you’re too expensive and too famous, and probably tougher than Rambo!'” Fortunately, Reynolds was used to losing out on films that became major success stories, and he’d developed a thick skin by then.
First Blood and its two sequels can be added to the pile of what-ifs Reynolds acquired during his career that includes James Bond, Star Wars, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Terms of Endearment, Pretty Woman, Die Hard, The Godfather, and Magnolia, a raft of missed opportunities that would be enough to break any actor’s spirit, looking at what they went on to achieve.
That said, it’s hard to imagine him as Trautman. The military veteran was largely an exposition machine who popped up in a handful of scenes, and Stallone is right in saying that Reynolds was too famous to pull it off convincingly. Sure, Douglas was a ‘Golden Age’ icon, but he was older and had gravitas, whereas the Boogie Nights scene-stealer made up for what he was lacking in the dramatic stakes with his natural charisma and screen presence.
Would he have even played a minor supporting role in the late ’70s, when he was earning millions of dollars per picture? Yes, according to Reynolds and Stallone, but it wouldn’t have been the best use of his talents.
