The classic movie Burt Reynolds refused to watch

(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)

Thu 13 February 2025 14:45, UK

In the 1990s, Burt Reynolds was in a strange spot. He had begun the decade by starring in a little-remembered two-season detective show called BL Stryker, before starring in four seasons of the acclaimed sitcom Evening Shade. His big-screen efforts in this era were almost exclusively terrible, though, with the likes of Cop and a Half, Meet Wally Sparks, and the direct-to-video action movie Raven sullying his reputation even more thoroughly than his questionable behaviour did in the ’70s and ’80s. Somewhere along the line, though, Reynolds seemingly embraced being a character actor instead of an ageing leading man, and he actually made a modern classic – that he refused to watch to his dying day.

Before getting to the classic that Reynolds hated so much that he nearly got into a fistfight with the director, it’s worth looking at another character actor effort from the year before it came out. You see, in ’96, Reynolds played a sleazy congressman in Demi Moore’s Striptease, a movie that was widely lambasted as one of the worst films ever made. Despite this, Reynolds’ performance was praised quite a bit, with critics noting he was funnier and more vulnerable on-screen than he’d been in years.

Amazingly, Reynolds lobbied for the part in Striptease so hard that he paid his own airfare to fly to Florida to audition. The producers weren’t keen on him being in the film because of his bad reputation and his ridiculous, over-the-top toupee that he insisted on wearing, but he proved to them he was willing to have no vanity in this role. “At the first audition, on the first day, Burt had to take off his toupee in front of six or seven people” producer Mike Lobell told The New York Times. “It was tough for him, but he did it. It was a very, very humbling thing to do. But by the end of the audition, it was really clear that Burt was the guy.”

In this role, Reynolds had to forgo dignity and subvert his previous leading man image while playing a man so perverted that he tells Moore’s stripper that he made love to her “fresh, hot lint.” Striptease obviously had a lot more sexual content than previous Reynolds movies, but audiences assumed he was simply moving with the times. Therefore, when it was announced that he had agreed to star as porn director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, it seemingly made perfect sense.

Only, here’s the thing: Reynolds hated working on that film because he found the content objectionable, despised the young wunderkind director Paul Thomas Anderson, and was so angry at his agent for facilitating the whole thing that he sacked him even after the role landed him a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar nomination.

“I needed a good film badly at that time,” Reynolds told Jonathan Ross in 2015. “So, I did a film that got a lot of attention, but it was about a subject matter that I have trouble with which is pornography. I didn’t think it was something my mother would go to.” While it is certainly hard to imagine why Reynolds believed his mother wouldn’t have watched Boogie Nights but presumably would have lined up for Striptease, it can’t be denied that he felt there was something different about the projects on a deep level.

Indeed, the Smokey and the Bandit star even admitted to Ross that he’d never actually watched Boogie Nights, to which the shocked host replied, “You should go and see that film. You might change your mind. I think you might genuinely.” However, he soon saw the stern look on Reynolds’ face and said, “You’re not convinced, are you?” The living legend simply responded, “No.”