The scene that almost killed Burt Reynolds: “That would have been it”
These days, Tom Cruise’s fanatical commitment to dangling from tall buildings, riding motorcycles off clifftops, and hitching rides outside aeroplanes is a significant selling point of the Mission: Impossible franchise. Audiences sit in the cinema, mouth agape, as they watch Cruise risk life and limb again and again for their entertainment. Cruise is far from the first actor to gain a reputation for doing his own stunts, though. After all, back in the 1960s and ’70s, Burt Reynolds never met a stunt he didn’t like the look of – and he hurt himself much, much more than Cruise ever has. In fact, Reynolds has admitted to nearly dying on one particularly hairy tumble.
Reynolds’ history of saying, “Hey, I could do that,” began on an episode of Pony Express in 1959 – and it happened completely by accident. While shooting a gunslinging scene atop a horse, the animal dumped Reynolds off its back, but he calmly stepped off and rolled to a safe landing. It looked great on camera, so the director asked the actor if he thought he could do it again. From that point on, Reynolds handled the vast majority of his own stunts.
When he first met Hal Needham, the man who would become his longtime stunt double and friend, on the set of Riverboat, Reynolds admitted to being super cocky. He chuckled to Variety in 2015 that he told Needham, “Look, I don’t want to take away from your talent. I’m sure you’re very good, but I do my own stunts.”
The veteran stunt performer smiled, “If you knew how many actors I’ve taken to the hospital that said that to me,” but encouraged Reynolds to show him what he was capable of.
Needless to say, Needham was impressed with Reynolds’ raw talent in the stunt game, so he invited him to his house and gave the young star a crash course in defying death for the camera. He grinned, “In his backyard, he had a rope net, and we’d climb this tree as high as we could go. We’d try to outdo each other. He’d do a flip, and then I’d have to do what he did.”
Over the years, Reynolds would become famous for his bravery/foolishness. Even though most stunts went off without a hitch, he did himself permanent damage with a couple that went badly wrong. For example, in 1971’s classic Deliverance, he insisted on falling over an actual waterfall instead of letting director John Boorman use a dummy. Naturally, this was a horrible idea because he cracked his tailbone on the way down, and the sheer force of the water ripped off all his clothes and shot him about a mile downriver.
In 2018, he confessed to Business Insider, “I tell everyone I was a 31-year-old guy in great shape before I went over the falls.”
Then, on 1984’s City Heat, Reynolds took a stray steel chair to the face, and it shattered his jaw. He lost 40 pounds during recovery because he couldn’t eat solid food and also developed a debilitating addiction to painkillers. He was eventually able to rid himself of the addiction but not the chronic pain from a lifetime of stunts. Indeed, the regretful star mused, “When it’s cold, and I’m limping around, I think, ‘Why didn’t I let Hal make some money and I just sit down?’ But you can’t go back.”
Interestingly, though, Reynolds believes only one of his stunts left him an inch from the great beyond, and for some reason, it’s not one of his better-known brushes with death. While shooting the 1973 detective comedy Shamus, one of the action scenes called for Reynolds to jump from a bridge to a nearby tree, where he was supposed to cling onto a thick branch.
Horrifyingly, though, Reynolds admitted, “I just missed the branch in the tree I was trying to grab and fell four stories and landed on my upper back – the shoulder blade region. Had the impact been one inch higher, that would have been it.” It’s a miracle the man could walk at all after that one.
