(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Most Hollywood stars who have been in the business for decades will have made decisions they later came to regret. However, the vast majority will also refuse to admit to them, instead claiming that everything happens for a reason and that they don’t like to dwell on the past. Burt Reynolds, to his credit, was not one of these actors. The iconic Boogie Nights star was always willing to fess up about his regrets, which were many and varied. His biggest one, though, was entirely self-inflicted and he believed it was caused by his fatal flaw of being an eternal optimist.
There was a time in the 1970s when Reynolds was legitimately one of the biggest stars in the movie business. After breaking through with his excellent performance in Deliverance, he spent most of the decade making action comedies like Shamus, The Longest Yard, Gator, and arguably his most iconic movie, Smokey and the Bandit.
These films made him the biggest box office draw in Hollywood, but few of them were what you’d call “good.” In fact, comedian Robert Wuhl once famously joked, “Burt Reynolds makes so many bad movies that when someone else makes a bad movie, Burt gets a royalty.”
Reynolds was more than aware of this negative perception of his career, though, which is why he occasionally experimented with more serious or sensitive roles, such as in 1979’s Starting Over. However, he told The New York Times in 1981 that he didn’t want to turn his back on his action audience – also known as “the guys who show up in pickup trucks.”
In this same interview, though, Reynolds acknowledged that he’d been running pretty hard at these action movies and may have made a few too many of them. In fact, the movie he promoted in the interview – 1981’s Paternity – was his 22nd movie in the nine years following Deliverance. The problem, as he saw it, was that he always believed he could take so-so material and make it better, but this wasn’t always the case. This optimistic attitude led to him making more than a few duds that he probably should have turned down.
“If I have any regrets, it is that I haven’t been more like Redford and those guys,” a pensive Reynolds mused. “When they don’t like a film, they walk away from it. I always see the possibilities. I’m always booked up for five years.”
In truth, this is a fascinating admission for an actor at the height of his powers to make. Can you imagine Denzel Washington or Tom Hanks telling a journalist their problem is that they sign up for too many bad movies, leaving them unable to accept the good parts that come along?
Amazingly, it’s not even something that Reynolds only mentioned once. In 2018, he told People magazine that this optimism was why he lost out on Jack Nicholson’s Oscar-winning role in Terms of Endearment. “I was a fool,” he lamented. “I had about three pictures that I told other people I would do, and in retrospect, I think back, and all I had to do is say, ‘Can we just put this off until I finish this picture?’”
In later years, Reynolds became convinced that the filmmakers likely would have said, “Sure,” and rearranged the schedule for him. “I wished I had done that one picture,” he concluded. “I think it could’ve changed things for me.”
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