The scene Kurt Russell regrets shooting: “One of the few things I’d never do again”
If an actor has been around for as long as Kurt Russell, then it’s understandable that they’d have a few regrets from a career that’s taken up almost their entire life.
He was only 12 when he made his feature debut in 1963’s It Happened at the World’s Fair, and he was introduced in some style by kicking Elvis Presley in the shins. By the time he’d left his teens, he was one of Walt Disney’s closest confidants and a studio star, which is a hell of an industry upbringing.
Russell did consider abandoning acting in favour of baseball until an injury curtailed those dreams, but he never really went away. In the last 60 years, he’s never been absent from the screen for longer than three years, and he’s lent his name to more cult classics than almost anybody else.
Of course, nobody spends that long in the limelight without becoming involved in a couple of incidents they look back on with wistful remorse, but Russell’s ratio is pretty good, considering how much time he’s spent in the business. He broke an antique guitar on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, which will always be at the top of his personal shit list.
He helped writer and director Ron Shelton develop Bull Durham before Kevin Costner’s star power edged him out of consideration, but that’s pretty much it. However, there’s a third regret that Russell has copped to, even if his frustrations aren’t for the reason most people would expect, given the circumstances.
Conspiring to barrel through countless screenwriters and multiple directors, Tango & Cash had no right to be as fun as it was. It’s not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s nothing if not an enjoyably mindless and divertingly entertaining one, with Russell clearly having a blast playing the more comedic foil to Sylvester Stallone’s straight-laced counterpart.
This being the 1980s, it wouldn’t send shockwaves around Tinseltown were Russell to object to a scene where his character dressed up as a woman to go undercover. His performance wasn’t entirely well-received, with the Razzies brazenly nominating him for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’ for that specific sequence, but that wasn’t why he said he never wanted to do anything like it ever again.
In an interview with Yahoo, John Carpenter’s muse described dressing in drag as “one of the few things that I’d never want to do again.” His reasons were hardly sexist, misogynistic, or offensive, but based entirely on the sight of what confronted him in the mirror when he woke up from a nap to discover the makeup artist had transformed him into a woman.
Instead, Russell’s apprehension was closer to home: “I was looking in the mirror at a really ugly version of my mother.” Plenty of men have wished for nothing more than not ending up like their fathers, but for the second-generation star, realising that he looked like a hideous facsimile of his beloved matriarch, Louise, was a step too far and a bridge he refused to cross for the rest of his days.
