The role Kurt Russell got paid twice to play: “People thought we were crazy”
It’s hard to imagine a time when Kurt Russell wouldn’t have been at the top of any Hollywood producer’s wish list for casting an action movie. However, despite making hits like Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and Tango & Cash in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the early ’90s that a push for Russell to become one of the industry’s biggest stars began. It all started with a producer so determined to cast Russell in his sci-fi action epic that he offered to pay him twice his usual asking price. The industry thought he was crazy, but there was a method to his supposed madness.
Amazingly, Hollywood only seemed to begin realising what it had with Russell when he made Tombstone in 1993. It was known that Russell had done everything in his power to shepherd that troubled production through choppy waters, emerging with a hit western and a new respect in the industry. His salary finally increased in the wake of that film, and producers began to speak his name in the same breath as the action stars who regularly guaranteed butts on cinema seats.
In Russell’s opinion, the reason he wasn’t viewed as an A-lister before Tombstone is because he’s a simple guy who leads a simple life, and this made him boring to the tabloids. “I’m not a magazine cover,” he told The New York Times. “I’m a movie guy. I’m a worker. My one responsibility is to give an audience a good show.” He added, “Guys like Eastwood, Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis are much more interesting magazine fare than me.”
One person in Hollywood who was adamant that Russell had been underutilised up until this point was Dean Devlin, the co-writer and producer of Stargate, a sci-fi adventure he was trying to get into production. “Kurt Russell is the guy you know,” he explained. “He’s not something out of a weight-lifting magazine or a cartoon character. The closest thing to him would have been Steve McQueen.”
Trying to cast the film’s lead role of Colonel Jonathan J ‘Jack’ O’Neil, a US Air Force Special Operations Officer suffering from depression after his son took his own life with his service weapon, was a tall order for Devlin. He knew he needed an actor who could be inherently likeable, as that would combat the dislikeable parts of O’Neil’s demeanour and backstory. He was convinced he needed Russell, so he pursued him relentlessly.
However, Russell wasn’t a fan of the script and was reticent to come on board. It soon emerged he’d been sent an early version of the screenplay and not the shooting draft, though, so once he read the final version, he agreed to sign up. Of course, it also helped that Devlin had convinced MGM to offer the star $7million – double the highest amount he had been paid for any prior film. Devlin admitted, “People thought we were crazy for paying him $7m…But I think Kurt is the next big action hero.”
Interestingly, something was backing up Devlin’s belief more than a simple gut feeling about Russell’s star potential. He had analysed the star’s box office returns and realised that his films tended to play exceedingly well overseas – so he organised a questionnaire of these foreign audiences. Russell told GQ, “They wanted to rate actors on their unlikeability. They wanted to find someone who was likeable because the part, as written, was not.”
Amusingly, the results of this questionnaire told Devlin there was only one actor who nobody in the world disliked: Kurt Russell. “Zero unlikeability!” Russell guffawed. He then quipped, “Now, that was a long time ago. That number may have changed significantly.”
