Robert Redford really didn’t want to feature in ‘Watchmen’
Few actors are as synonymous with the very idea of ‘cinema’ as Robert Redford, with whom, at almost every point of his illustrious career, you can pinpoint a movie he was involved in, either as an actor, a director, or both, that slots into the grand story of the medium.
He also shaped the future of the business through his work with the Sundance Film Festival, which he established in 1978. Prior to his death in 2025, he was a living, breathing example of the joys of the movies, but that doesn’t mean he was confined to the big screen.
While Redford didn’t spend much time in the realm of TV, with most of his appearances coming in his youth, he’s appeared in three different episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, as well as a number of different western series that were all the rage in the early 1960s. His biggest contribution to the idiot’s lantern was ‘Nothing in the Dark’, one of the most popular episodes in the history of The Twilight Zone. However, we actually missed out on him being part of a major series at the other end of his career.
In 2019, Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof led an HBO series based on the classic comic book, Watchmen, which received rave reviews, especially when compared to Zack Snyder’s less-than-successful attempt to turn the story into a film a decade earlier; yet, according to Lindelof himself, it could have been even better.
“We wrote Robert Redford a letter, describing our intention with his usage in the show,” he told Collider, “What our general sense of what Watchmen was to us and an incredibly high esteem in which we hold him both as an actor, and a purveyor of the arts…as a prominent progressive liberal, who shares many of the same ideologies with a number of us, behind the scenes… We left the door open in that letter, should he choose to respond to it.”
Fans of the original graphic novel will remember that Redford’s name appears in the closing pages, where the actor announces that he is running for president of the United States, a not-so-subtle nod to Ronald Reagan, another actor-turned-politician with the same initials.
Lindelof wanted the real Redford to appear on his show as a version of himself who actually becomes president as part of a sinister plot; alas, since this didn’t happen, he is only referenced by name.
The real-life Sundance Kid was very politically active, extremely vocal on issues such as environmentalism, LGBTQ+ rights, and the treatment of Native Americans, endorsing candidates on either side of the spectrum, to even lending a quote to the back of Donald Trump’s 2015 book Crippled America, although he quickly walked back his support once the true nature of Trump’s political ambitions was revealed.
While the show did just fine without him, it would have been fascinating to see how Lindelof’s plans for Redford would have played out, which may have even led to Alan Moore giving the series his blessing. Who am I kidding, he was always going to hate it.
