The role Kurt Russell played to stick it to his critics: “You know? Fuck them”
It’s easy to forget that Kurt Russell wasn’t always the macho action star he came to be known as, with his repeated collaborations with John Carpenter in movies like Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China.
Before he was playing Wyatt Earp or Stuntman Mike, he was a Disney star, rising to prominence when he was just a child. When you’ve started your career that young, it can certainly be hard to change people’s perceptions of you. You only have to look at those classic Disney star cases, the whole good-gone-bad attitude, sometimes feeling like the only way to get people’s attention and show them that you’ve changed.
Proving people wrong is a big part of growing up in the spotlight, even if you don’t go as far as swinging naked on a wrecking ball and incessantly sticking out your tongue. However, you go about proving that you’re not just a Disney kid but actually have the ability to mature into more adult roles.
To be pigeonholed or perpetually viewed as a child must be frustrating, and while Russell had starred in his fair share of Disney movies throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, like Follow Me, Boys! and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, becoming somewhat of a muse to Walt Disney himself, who was a huge fan his work as an actor, as he started to hit adulthood, he couldn’t continue appearing in family-friendly comedies and needed to do something different.
Hence, when the opportunity arose to play the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ for a television movie directed by Carpenter, Russell had to take it, and it actually became a full-circle moment for him. He had previously appeared alongside Elvis Presley in his first ever screen appearance, It Happened At The World’s Fair, in which he had to kick the singer’s character, and now that he was older, he had to chance to play him in 1979’s Elvis, although critics had a lot to say about this casting decision.
“Here’s the thing,” he told Mandatory. “When I did Elvis, I went through about a six-month period of listening to the world, anybody that had any inclination to write anything about the upcoming Elvis biopic, they were just having a field day with Kurt Russell. Like, ‘Oh my fucking god. Oh my fucking god. Oh my god. You got to be kidding me. That Disney actor. That Disney guy?’ They couldn’t come up with enough putdowns”.
Initially, Russell was offended, but he soon realised that all he could do was prove them wrong with his range. He could play Elvis, “And at first I kind of went, ‘Oh yeah? Whatever’. Then I went, ‘You know? Fuck them’. And then I went, ‘Oh, wait a minute. Bring it on, boys. Bring it on, because it really does give me nowhere to go but up’. And then I thought, ‘I’ll be good at this. I know that. I know I’m going to do a good job here.’ And at that point they owe me an apology.”
In the end, his turn as Elvis was such a good performance that critics were lauding his talents, and he was even nominated for an Emmy for it, proving his worth to those who doubted him, and that was only the beginning for him.
