Burt Reynolds
Actor; Jupiter
Originally published May 2012
My father was the Riviera Beach chief of police. He arrested me twice. Once he put me in jail for fighting, and he came in and said to the other guys, ‘Your father’s here. You can go home. Your father’s here. You can go home.’ And then he looked right at me and said, ‘Your father didn’t show up.’
I dared to go into Costco the other day. Everything was fine until I was trying to find a little tiny paintbrush and some paints, and I turned around and there were eight people staring at me. I was in line to check out, and the manager came over and said, ‘Can I help you get through this?’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m fine.’ Suddenly, I’m signing autographs, and if you sign one, you have to sign another, and people are getting PO’d because you’re stopping the line, so you have to step out of the line, but you can’t go back in, so you have to go to the back of the line. Eventually, I said to the manager, ‘I’ll take you up on that offer.’
When I was a kid, people called me ‘Mullet’ and in order not to be called Mullet, and to not hit somebody in the mouth, I found if you put some pads on and hit somebody in the mouth, they thought you were wonderful. So I started playing football, and they stopped calling me Mullet and started calling me ‘Buddy.’
I was walking with Marilyn Monroe on our way to the Actors Studio, and she just had on an old football jersey and pair of slacks, no makeup, and we’re walking on Broadway. We’re just coming up to Childs Restaurant and I say to her, ‘You know, this is amazing, Marilyn. We’ve been walking four blocks and nobody is bothering you.’ And she went, ‘Oh. Want to see her?’ I said, ‘What?’ She says, ‘Do you want to see her?’ Now, she didn’t take off any clothes. She didn’t do anything, except change her posture. We took about four steps, and it was damn near a riot. We needed the police to get us out of there.
Growing up, I was enormously shy. I would hide behind being a jock.
My freshman year at FSU, I started two games. My sophomore year, I was a starting left halfback, but before the first game, in practice, a guy hit me — the play was over and he just came in and cut me on the side — and I ended up eventually needing four knee operations. It really was devastating emotionally and in every other way. It was very difficult for me to get it through my thick head that there was possibly something else you could do at the university besides play football and chase Pi Beta Phis.
In high school, I dated a girl from Palm Beach, and I’ll never forget the second night I had a date with her I went to the door and rang the doorbell. Her mother, who was very attractive, came to the door and said, ‘From now on, Buddy, when you come to pick up Mary Alice, please come to the service entrance.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s all right. That’s what I had in mind, anyway.’
I came home, recovering from the knee operation. I enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College. I was in an English literature class and, like all good football players, I was on the last row. Watson Duncan, the teacher, was talking about Byron, Shelley, Keats, and he waved me to the front of the class. I thought, ‘Oh no, I’m in trouble. What did I do?’ He said, ‘I want you on the front row,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Because you’re going to be an actor.’ And then he said, ‘At 12 o’clock tomorrow, we’re having readings for a play, and I want you there.’
The play was Outward Bound, which is a magnificent play. He gave me the part of this tragic character who was an alcoholic, and I was in a perfect mood to play the most tragic character on the planet. ... Opening night, it felt like when I was 9 or 10 years old and I walked on a football field the first time. I thought, ‘I’m home.’
The other time my father arrested me I was stealing doughnuts. It was a silly thing, you know, but it’s still stealing.
I know a lot of actors who become a character they played. They decide ‘I’m better as this character than I am as me, so I’ll be this character for the rest of my life.’
We just had our 40th reunion of Deliverance. Jon Voight and Ned Beatty, they still think I’m Lewis, the character I played. Regardless of their success — Ned has been nominated for an Academy Award and Jon has won one — regardless of that, they say, ‘Where are we going for dinner, Lewis? Can we go to dinner?’ I have to tell them what to do.
Smokey and the Bandit has a life that I can’t explain. It goes on and on. When we did the picture, sales of Trans Ams went up 700%, so GM gave me a Trans Am every year. Well, I gave one to my niece. I gave one to my nephew. I gave one to someone else. After five years went by, I didn’t get my Trans Am. I didn’t want to be one of these schmucks who calls up and says, ‘Where’s my Trans Am?’ But I thought maybe something happened in the delivery or something, so I called GM. They put me through to one guy, then another, then another, and I finally ended up talking to the president, and he said, ‘I’m the new president, and I didn’t like that movie.’ I never got another one.
Editor’s note: Reynolds died in 2018 at age 82.
Interview by Art Levy
Photo by Brian Smith
“I can play a cop. I’ve played my dad hundreds of times. I played a lot of people in my life. I’ll take that walk. I’ll take that smile. All actors are thieves.”
