Robert Redford tried to quit the single biggest hit of his career: “I want out”
Even though he was one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s biggest stars, Robert Redford wasn’t one of the period’s most consistent box office darlings, but that was a decision of his own making.
It would have been easy for the actor and filmmaker to settle into the box that studio executives across town were trying to push him in, but he didn’t want to spend his professional life coasting by on his combination of good looks and natural charm, so he didn’t.
While many of his peers were prone to headlining the odd big-budget blockbuster or frothy feat of cinematic escapism in exchange for a hefty paycheque, Redford was never that guy. Instead, he leveraged his star power to make the movies he wanted to make, choosing the material itself over material wealth.
That said, the highest-grossing entry in his filmography happens to be the second-highest-grossing release of all time, with the Academy Award-winning director coming out of retirement to make a cameo appearance in Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, and it shouldn’t come as a shock that the second top-earning title he was in was Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Beyond that, though, Redford was only in three pictures that made upwards of $250 million at the global box office, less than you might expect from one of his generation’s definitive leading men. It was almost limited to two, since he tried to back out of the film that usurped Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa and George Roy Hill’s The Sting.
In the early 1990s, Redford was still a big deal, albeit not as big as he used to be. He’d been avoiding the mainstream for so long that he was in danger of slipping from his A-list pedestal, so his agent, Michael Ovitz, nudged him in the direction of Adrian Lyne’s Indecent Proposal, which looked like a sure-fire hit.
After all, it was a glossy erotic drama being made when the genre was at its peak, and with the director of 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction at the helm, no less. Redford agreed to play John Gage, who offers a million dollars to spend a night with Demi Moore’s Diana Murphy, but then he got cold feet.
“I thought he was going to tell us he didn’t like something in the script,” producer Sherry Lansing recalled to The Hollywood Reporter. “But he said, ‘I want out’. He said, ‘The kids are wonderful, but I’m not. It’s their movie’. I said, ‘Bob, you’re amazing’. And he said, ‘That’s very kind, but I have to leave.'”
He was ready to bail, but the intervention of his representatives and the last-minute hiring of Robert Getchell to give the screenplay a once-over ultimately changed his mind. Indecent Proposal‘s $266 million take from cinemas made it Redford’s biggest-ever hit in a leading role, and he’d almost quit before shooting.
