The actor Brad Pitt waited his entire life to meet: “This was the guy for us”
Brad Pitt is such a towering presence in Hollywood that it’s easy to assume he’s seen it all. With decades of superstardom behind him, he’s worked with legends, shaped iconic roles, and become one himself. So the idea of Pitt being starstruck by anyone – especially a fellow actor – almost feels impossible. But even the biggest names have their heroes.
It turns out that no matter how famous you get, some movie stars are so legendary they can still leave you awestruck – and that’s exactly what happened to Pitt while shooting Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
It was a movie filled with heavy hitters, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie and Al Pacino, but one of the heaviest hitters and cast highlights never made it into the movie, and that’s the myth, the legend, Burt Reynolds.
A pinnacle of 1970s American pop culture, Reynolds had been cast as George Spahn, the ranch owner who rents his ranch out first to Hollywood westerns and then to the infamous Manson Family, and given that the film was Tarantino’s ode to the era, it was only right that he appear in the movie. Not only that, but his first-hand experience of that world made him invaluable to Tarantino as an advisor, with him being the only actor in the lineup who received the entire script, because the director wanted him to give his perspective and wanted to impress him.
For Pitt, there was seemingly a lot less ego involved in his excitement over working with Reynolds. “I got to meet Burt Reynolds! This was the guy for us growing up in the Ozarks. Smokey and the Bandit was everything to me,” he was quoted as saying in the recently published book, The Making of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
While Reynolds never made it into the film, Pitt was lucky enough to get a few days of rehearsals in with him before his passing, a moment the Midwestern kid inside him had always waited for, about which he noted, “He was razor sharp, always had something funny to say; he was as funny as fuck”.
Reynolds’ influence clearly continued into Pitt’s acting years, as the Fight Club actor has built up his own reputation for being funny, charming and cool, maybe not as cool as Burt, who could be, but he was definitely trying to get there.
And, funnily enough, despite the actor being well into his 80s at that point, Tarantino had originally offered Pitt’s role of stuntman Cliff Booth to Reynolds, which, once again, was due to his experience in the industry, and the fact that he knew every stuntman there was to know, so the director thought him a great fit.
Fortunately for Pitt, Reynolds passed on this role and took the other, meaning not only did he get cast, and get cast in the role turned down by his hero, but he finally got to meet him, too. It’s the stuff of dreams, although presumably he’d have preferred getting to actually star alongside the legend of an actor.
