Kurt Russell: The Man with Zero Unlikeability

When we talk about the great everyman actors, names like James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy and Tom Hanks inevitably trip off the tongue. They embody an American ideal – unfussy, straight-talking, moral and always ready to do the right thing. But can you imagine Jimmy Stewart battling a shape-shifting alien with a flamethrower or Tom Hanks as a nihilistic special forces guy sent into a dystopian New York to rescue the President?

That’s where Kurt Russell comes in. Like the others, he has a pure everyman quality – whoever he plays, we can relate to this guy – but he represents a more rugged and individualistic strain of Americana. Perhaps that’s why many of his iconic roles are either in westerns or movies that are at least western-adjacent in some way: Russell is at his best when he portrays an outsider, a maverick, someone who exists on the fringes of the establishment and doesn’t give two hoots about grabbing the glory,

His acting career goes back over 60 years and he’s been a star for more than 40 of them, but he has always taken Hollywood and stardom on his own terms. Perhaps the American actor he most resembles is Paul Newman: Cool, handsome, aloof but always generous when speaking in public, fundamentally decent, happy in a long-term relationship with a fellow actor and completely unbothered by all the Hollywood hoopla. The big difference is that Newman won an Oscar for his performance in The Color of Money and received nine other nominations, not to mention a raft of other nods from other major Award bodies. To date, Russell has a solitary Golden Globe nomination to his name, for Supporting Actor in Silkwood. But then Russell doesn’t care all that much – for all his fame, acting is very much a job that supports his lifestyle.

Fans are often suspicious of artists who treat their existence in the rarified stratus of cinema as a vocation rather than a calling, but Russell has always been very open about that. He followed his father, Bing Russell, into acting, but his true passion was baseball – Bing had played in the minor leagues before moving to Hollywood and carving out a steady but similarly minor-league career as an actor.

Kurt, on the other hand, only auditioned for a film role as a kid because it might give him the chance to meet a couple of his favourite baseball players. He didn’t get the part or the opportunity to meet his heroes, but he did get to meet the King at the age of 11 when he landed an uncredited cameo in It Happened at the World’s Fair, one of Elvis Presley’s lightweight musical comedy jaunts. The role amounted to his character kicking Presley in the shin and Russell fondly remembers his time hanging out with the superstar.

The bit part began Russell’s long association with Presley – he would later portray him to critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination for Elvis (1979), the TV movie where he also began his fruitful collaborations with John Carpenter. Further along in his career, Russell was rumoured to have provided the voice of the King in Forrest Gump and then played an Elvis impersonator in 3000 Miles to Graceland.

But not before his dream of becoming a baseball player came to an end. His first screen appearance in World’s Fair led to other roles, most notably in two Disney productions, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) and The Barefoot Executive (1971). In the meantime, he played ball before an injury forced his premature retirement in 1973.

Uncle Walt evidently placed stock in Russell’s potential, predicting a great career for the young actor in a 1966 TV appearance and, according to Russell, adding animated penguins to Mary Poppins after giving the kid a sneak preview. For many years an urban legend claimed that “Kurt Russell” were Disney’s last words, jotted down on a pad while dying in hospital. Future revelations about the contents of the note debunked that notion, but it was still clear that the mogul had Russell in mind for future projects just before he passed away.

The 1980s: Carpenter’s Cult Icon

Elvis opened the door to Hollywood and it didn’t take long for him to find solid roles, first taking the lead in Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars (1980) before John Carpenter came calling again. The director had conceived of Escape from New York in the mid-70s, tapping into the feeling of disenchantment and anger that followed in the wake of Watergate scandal, but no studio wanted to take a punt on a screenplay that was, by Carpenter’s own admission, “too violent, too scary, and too weird.”

The huge success of Halloween and The Fog changed the mind of executives and the project was greenlit, although AVCO Embassy Pictures wanted either Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, or Tommy Lee Jones to play Snake Plissken, the story’s cynical antihero. Carpenter insisted on Russell, who grabbed the chance to leave behind his lightweight screen image and portray a real bad-ass, working hard to get himself in prime physical condition and suggesting the signature touch of Snake’s eye-patch.

The result was Russell’s first iconic character, drawing on Clint Eastwood’s terse demeanour to play a guy who lives by his wits and doesn’t give a damn about anything beyond the next few moments. Although the movie was set in the not-too-distant future of 1997, the western connection was complete with the casting of Lee Van Cleef as Hauk, the no-nonsense police chief who sends Snake on his suicide mission. 

Russell is proud of Snake Plissken because he has “no social redeeming value” – indeed, Carpenter cut backstory scenes which gave the character some more comradely qualities. Plissken is slightly softened by his affection for Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) and tentative love interest in Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau, Carpenter’s wife at the time), but otherwise he is the perfect antihero. But here’s the thing about Russell’s screen persona: We root for Snake anyway because he’s Kurt Russell.

Carpenter and Russell formed a strong bond and they remain friends to this day. In some ways, Carpenter is Russell’s close equivalent as a director – blue collar vibes, unpretentious, and quite happy to live on the outskirts of mainstream Hollywood cinema. Carpenter cast Russell again as the nominal lead in The Thing. As with Snake Plissken, he made the most of a character with almost no backstory as R.J. Macready, a helicopter pilot at a doomed Antarctic research station. Here, Russell underlined his everyman appeal as a regular Joe who just wants to get drunk and play chess rather than shoulder the burden of leadership when the base is under attack from a shape-shifting alien. He pulled off the role with effortless cool, rocking an aviator jacket, his trademark magnificent hair, and an impractically huge sombrero-style hat that has inspired whole articles of its own.

Despite Russell’s newfound tough-guy status in Carpenter’s movies, he also has an endearing quality of fallibility. Plissken may be a Special Forces commando, but there is also a sense that he’s out of his depth and making things up as he goes along. MacReady can’t handle losing a game of chess to his computer and gets exasperated when the rest of the crew turn to him for answers. Come to the fatalistic conclusion, he’s in no mood for any more heroics, ready to die in the snow and maybe fall victim to the creature himself.

These aspects all came together in his finest role, playing blowhard truck driver Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China. Inverting the action hero stereotype even as it was just establishing itself in the mid-1980s, Russell observed that Burton is a “sidekick who thinks he’s the hero,” and spends most of the movie wondering what the hell is going on while his buddy Wang (Dennis Dun) leads the charge to rescue the girl and kicks most of the butts.

Big Trouble was essentially a western dressed up in modern ‘80s trappings with added elements of supernatural magic, monster movies, and kung-fu – Gary Goldman’s original screenplay was set in the Old West, drawing on the history of the real-life Tong Wars in San Francisco in the late 19th Century. Goldman’s hero, a former sharpshooter who makes a living from delivering supplies to Chinese railroad workers, switched from a cowboy to a truck driver in the rewrite. The railroad became Jack’s truck, the Pork Chop Express, and elements of his earlier western incarnation remain with his saddlebag and boots.

Although Escape from New York was a hit, the early years of Russell’s big-screen career was largely defined by a string of movies that performed poorly and received middling-to-negative reviews from critics. In between the dual flops of The Thing and Big Trouble (I know, it is hard to believe they both bombed at the box office), Russell put in solid work in Silkwood (earning his solitary Golden Globe nod), The Mean Season, and The Best of Times. This was a lean period for Russell where only Silkwood was a critical and commercial success at the time.

During this run, he also starred in Swing Shift alongside Goldie Hawn. The pair had met years earlier on the set of Disney’s The One and Only, Genuine, and Original Family Band and started dating during auditions for Jonathan Demme’s box office dud. Russell had divorced from actress Season Hubley earlier in the year and the rest is history. Although he and Hawn never married, they are one of Hollywood’s longest-standing couples.

The pair teamed up again for Garry Marshall’s Overboard (1987) gaining praise for their chemistry in a movie that just about made its money back. Russell finally broke his box office curse and rounded out the decade with two big glossy hits, Tequila Sunrise alongside Mel Gibson, and the utterly preposterous Tango & Cash with Sylvester Stallone – one of my guilty-pleasure movies from the ‘80s.

The 1990s: Zero Unlikeability

Having survived a wobbly start to his Hollywood career, Kurt Russell established himself as a reliably bankable star in the 1990s. While his total gross never threatened to make him one of the top box office earners, he quietly went about his business turning in steady performances in a string of successful movies.

He headlined an all-star cast with a dual role in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991); played the earnest husband opposite Ray Liotta’s leering psycho in Unlawful Entry (1992); and added a tremendous moustache to his repertoire playing Wyatt Earp in Tombstone (1993). Russell’s innate sense of decency made him a great fit, and he also had family ties to the role – His father Bing appeared in Gunfight at O.K. Corral (1957), and his son Wyatt was named after the legendary lawman.

He received top billing in Roland Emmerich’s 1994 sci-fi smash Stargate, playing steely Special Ops officer Jack O’Neil. This movie provides an anecdote that perhaps sums up Russell’s enduring appeal the best. The film’s producers were concerned that the character wasn’t particularly endearing in the screenplay and ran a global poll to find out which actors had the most likeability. According to Russell, the result was conclusive: Cinema goers felt that he had zero unlikeability. As a result, Russell was offered more than double his usual fee to take the role. The investment paid off, with Russell standing out in a movie high on spectacle but low on memorable characters.

Perhaps surprisingly given his ‘80s action credentials and Hollywood’s gradual move away from muscle men like Stallone and Schwarzenegger towards more regular-guy heroes, Russell didn’t fully become an A-grade action star like Bruce Willis (the Die Hard series), Keanu Reeves (Speed), Will Smith (Independence Day), and Nicolas Cage (Con Air) in the ‘90s era of blockbusters. Perhaps it was down to his age but, now in his 40s, he still chipped in with Executive Decision (1996) and Breakdown (1997) - the latter was a gripping no-frills thriller that stands out as one of the most suspenseful movies of the decade.

Overall, the ‘90s was a strong period for Russell, although there were some mis-steps along the way. Two of them saw the actor donning an eyepatch once more: Goofing around as the pirate-like Captain Ron opposite Martin Short, and reprising his role as Snake Plissken in Escape from L.A. (1996). Both were savaged by critics. Finally, he rounded out the ‘90s by playing another hardened military type in Soldier, a box office disaster that appeared to send Russell’s career back on a downward trajectory from whence it had come.

2000 - Present: The Comeback

The early years of the 21st Century was a rough patch for Kurt Russell. After a three-year absence following the Soldier mis-fire, he returned to the screen in the Razzie-nominated 3000 Miles to Graceland; played part of an ensemble in Bob Gale’s underwhelming directorial debut Interstate 60; appeared in another Martin Short bomb called Jiminy Glick in Lalawood; and schmaltzed it up opposite a very young Dakota Fanning in Dreamer.

When he did have a hit, it was generally a supporting role, such as his turns in Vanilla Sky and Sky High. He also put in some strong performances during this period, most notably in Dark Blue and Miracle, but it was a far cry from the success of the previous decade. Even the would-be blockbuster Poseidon, Wolfgang Petersen’s mean-spirited remake of the classic ‘70s disaster movie, ended up losing money.

Then came Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse. Tarantino had developed a reputation for resurrecting careers and Russell would be the next beneficiary with the juicy role of Stuntman Mike, a sadistic killer who enjoys battering young women to death in his souped-up vintage muscle car.

Mickey Rourke was Tarantino’s original pick before he narrowed it down to a shortlist including Sylvester Stallone, Ving Rhames, Willem Dafoe, John Travolta and even Kal Penn of Harold & Kumar fame. Once he turned to Russell, Tarantino said:

For people of my generation, he’s a true hero… but now, there’s a whole audience out there that doesn’t know what Kurt Russell can do. When I open the newspaper and see an ad that says ‘Kurt Russell in Dreamer’ or ‘Kurt Russell in Miracle,’ I’m not disparaging these movies, but I’m thinking: ‘When is Kurt Russell going to be badass again?’

Death Proof sure answered that question. Russell grabbed the role with both hands, putting in a performance that is both charismatic and scary. He gives Mike that classic Russell twinkle, making it not too far-fetched that young women would get into a car with this solitary middle-aged dude hanging out in a bar. Even after we see him in full psycho mode, we still kind of like him… because he’s Kurt Russell.

The role put Russell back on the map again, but it would still take several more years and a few more mediocre flicks before directors fully tapped into what he could evidently offer as an older actor.

2015 was a landmark year in that respect. First, he played Mr. Nobody in Furious 7, a character that could have been very generic without Russell’s qualities in the role. Next up, he was outstanding as Franklin Hunt, the quiet and dignified sheriff at the heart of Bone Tomahawk, S. Craig Zahler’s grisly cannibal western. Sticking with the six-shooters and epic facial hair, he then chewed scenery as John “The Hangman” Ruth, the grizzled bounty hunter in Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.

Russell was back and it was like he’d never been away. He followed up with another solid role in Deepwater Horizon and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame the year after. He appeared in two more Fast & Furious entries; took a small part and narrated Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; and gave one of his most interesting recent performances in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Cast as Ego, an omnipotent living planet and the extraterrestrial father of Peter Quill, he made total sense in the role. Chris Pratt has similar regular-Joe charms and imbued Quill with the same irrepressible swagger and fallibility that Russell brought to Jack Burton in the ‘80s. Indeed, The character’s introduction in the first Guardians movie is very Burton-esque, mystified that nobody other than himself recognises him as Starlord. So seeing Russell as Quill’s dad was a wonderful “of course!” moment of casting, and we still enjoy Ego’s company even after we find out the true extent of his nefarious schemes.

Since then, Russell has portrayed the character that makes him proudest: The coolest Santa Claus to ever grace the screen in The Christmas Chronicles and its sequel. It may have seemed like stunt casting when first announced, but the joy of these two otherwise routine movies is how fully committed Russell is to playing Santa as a real person. He dives into the role with gusto and his preparation is above and beyond. Ever the professional, he wrote 200 pages of backstory for his character ahead of the second part. To put the fairy on top of the tree, who else but Goldie Hawn could play Mrs. Claus in this scenario?

Over the past few years, Russell has also returned to TV work for the first time since the ‘70s. He voiced Ego again in Marvel’s What If..? and shared a role with his son Wyatt in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, playing the young and old version of kaiju investigator Lee Shaw.

Now in his seventies and dividing his time between acting gigs and enjoying his home life as a wine enthusiast and vintner, it is unlikely that he will ever change his approach to acting: It’s a great job that supports his pleasurable lifestyle, not a reason for existing. Over the past decade or so, his cool factor among liberal fans has largely remained intact despite some criticism about his libertarian politics and stance on gun control, perhaps because he talks about such issues with the same openness and affability as he does everything else. He tends to face critics with a touch of good old Jack Burton bravado: “Give me your best shot. I can take it.” That approach might come across as arrogant from any other actor, but the tension is defused by that infectious laugh and we let it slide because it’s Kurt Russell.

So there you have it, our profile of Kurt Russell. What do you think of him as an actor, and what are your favourite roles? Let us know!