Kurt Russell discusses hunting, where the NRA gets it wrong, what it's like to earn eight figures a picture, and who would make for the best-ever Hollywood fantasy baseball team. And what Goldie is like in bed.
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It's early Thursday morning and Kurt Russell is looking forward to a four-day weekend off from the filming of Executive Decision. He's been on the Warner Bros. lot for months now, playing a think-tank guy who finds himself trying to disarm terrorists who are threatening to blow up a jet. The 44-year-old actor, who's been acting professionally for 35 years, has decided to drive himself to work this day, but when he pulls into Warners' Burbank lot, the guard won't let him through. "I'm Kurt Russell," the actor says. "I'm doing a movie on Stage 15." "I know who you are," the guard replies. "But you don't have a pass."
There's a phone nearby reserved for people who don't have passes, but the guard won't even let Russell on the lot to use it. This is no way to treat a movie star whose last seven pictures have grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, but at this particular studio kiosk, the Guardian of the Sacred Movie Gate is the great equalizer, Russell thinks of just turning around and making it a five-day weekend, hut he finally drives across the street to use a public phone. When he eventually gets to the set, a producer wants to know why he's so late. "They wouldn't let me in," Russell says. What happened to that particular studio guard is uncertain, but by the end of the day Russell gets a movie-style apology: a cap with the initials FBI sewn on the front--compliments of the studio's security department.
Once he's on a set, Russell treats acting as a job. His father, Bing, became an actor after a head injury curtailed his career as a pro ballplayer, and Kurt got into it when he was nine because there was an audition for a baseball movie and he wanted to meet one of his heroes, Mickey Mantle. He didn't get the part, but by 12 he was starring in his own TV series, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters. For Walt Disney, Russell made such movies as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band, where he first saw Goldie Hawn, a dancer in that 1968 film.
Russell then set out for a career in pro baseball, but that dream was cut short by a shoulder injury. Back to acting, he won acclaim portraying Elvis Presley in the 1979 TV movie Elvis. In the '80s Russell appeared in a dozen films ranging from Used Cars and Silkwood to Tequila Sunrise and Tango & Cash. The most important for him personally was Swing Shift in 1983, where he fell in love with Goldie Hawn. Both had been in failed marriages, both were parents (Russell had a son, Boston, with actress Season Hubley; Hawn had Oliver and Kate with performer Bill Hudson), and soon they were living together and having a child, Wyatt.
Lately, Russell's been in the entertainment news because of the large salaries he's being paid: $7 million for StarGate, $7.5 million for Executive Decision and $10 million for Escape From LA.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: What was it about Executive Decision that attracted you to it?
KURT RUSSELL: When I read Executive Decision, it was a real page-turner. I read scripts for the movies more than I do for the characters. I've read lots of characters I'd like to play, but I didn't enjoy the movie itself that much. I liked the fun of Executive Decision, You know, I feel when an audience sees my name attached to a film, they think it'll probably be a pretty good movie. The movies I do, if we make them well, will be fun to watch. They may not be the best movie of the year, and I may not be your favorite actor, but people come up to me all the time and say, "I like the movies you do."
Q: Your father once told you, "If you're getting paid a man's salary, do a man's job," What would he say to the $7 million to 10 million you're now getting for a film?
A: I had an interesting moment with my father two years ago, a strange conversation over the phone where at the end he was saying, "They're going to pay you all this money, what's the catch?" I said. "There is no catch, dad. They've finally realized that the movies I'm in make money. That's the catch." I realized that I was on a new level he didn't know about; and neither did I, until recently. So he could no longer advise me. That kind of thing is strange, because many years ago I used to be an actor whose movies didn't make that much money.
Q: How do you feel about the salaries you're earning?
A: If they're willing to pay me that, I must be worth it.
Q: Have you ever done anything on film that made you uncomfortable?
A: The only time in my entire life as an actor when I felt I didn't know what I was doing was on Tango & Cash, when I had to dress up as a woman. It's not an acting chore I'd care to do again. I looked like a really ugly version of my mother, who happens to be beautiful. I don't get transvestism.
Q: Define the difference between an "actor" and a "star."
A: James Spader gave me the best explanation of what a star is. He said when you're a guy and you go to the movies, and you see another guy on-screen and you say, "That guy's really good," that guy won't be a movie star. But when you say, "I don't want to be like that guy, I want to be that guy," that's a movie star.
Q: Did you ever want to be some other guy? Say, Mickey Mantle?
A: Not really, although I would've liked to have had the gifts physically to be able to do what Mickey Mantle did. I would have liked to have not been injured, as I was, and to have been able to have gone on to the big leagues, I wanted to win awards as a ballplayer.
Q: I've heard that a lot of Bull Durham was about you. True?
A: Bull Durham is tough to talk about. Ronnie Shelton and I both lived that life, there were a lot of things in there that were derivative of what had happened to me. I was surprised that Ronnie [did] it with somebody else. I went to Europe on a vacation, having said the script was great, and I came back to discover Kevin [Costner] was doing it. Ronnie got a better deal. So I pulled a practical joke on him that wiped the slate clean for me. I was working on Winter People about 60 miles from where he was doing Bull Durham. I got on the phone, pretended to be [production chief] Mike Medavoy, ordered that Ronnie be pulled off the set, and I told him that the dailies were shit, the movie was shit and Costner was not working, "Here's what we're going to do,"' I told him. "Kurt Russell's 60 miles north of you finishing Winter People tonight. He will be on the set Monday morning." There was this long pause until Ronnie realized who he was really talking to, and then he said, "You son of a bitch!" [Laughing] I had him going for a few minutes, though.
Q: Since we're talking about a baseball picture, are you up for creating an actors' All-Star team?
A: Yeah, we can do that. At first base you want somebody who's going to hit a lot and be an OK fielder, so you want the equivalent of Lou Gehrig, and that would be Cary Grant. Second--I'd go with one of the great comedians: Chaplin. Shortstop-- strong arm, OK fielder, solid up the middle: Katharine Hepburn, Third-- power, good bat, dependable: Bette Davis. Clark Gable in center. Eastwood in left. Goldie in right, because to balance this outfield we need a strong dose of comedy. Behind the plate is easy: Henry Fonda. On the mound, Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne. With Paul Muni in relief. Marlon Brando as my designated hitter, because I don't know where I'm going to field him. Spencer Tracy can manage.
Q: Besides Eastwood, Goldie and Brando, that's an Old-Timer's team. Let's play them against contemporary opponents.
A: OK, but they're going to get killed. Tom Hanks at first, Tom Cruise at second, Jack Nicholson at short, Barbra Streisand at third. In right, Robin Williams, Paul Newman in center. Mel Gibson in left. Arnold Schwarzenegger catching. Sly Stallone and Meryl Streep on the mound, with De Niro in relief, Jim Carrey as DH. Al Pacino as a player-manager. Now compare that lineup to the other one, there's no comparison, it will be a four-game series.
Q: Since this is Movieline's annual Sex issue, Kurt, here come the sex questions. How many girlfriends did you have in high school?
A: A couple. My take on it was to have at it and have fun.
Q: Was it always fun?
A: Well, there was one girl who convinced me--this was when I was younger, we were both five--that it was actually a good thing to eat your own poop. She'd say, "Go on, do it." And I thought, OK. So I bit it and it wasn't bad. I chewed it and then remembered thinking, "I don't think so." It was at that time that one or both of our moms opened the door.
Q: Back to sex: who was sexy when you were 15?
A: Brigitte Bardot. Bardot was the first female goddess for me. Though my dad tells this story that Marilyn Monroe was the first person I responded to. We went to a drive-in movie. I used to suck my thumb, and I was sitting in the back seat watching and Monroe came on in Some Like It Hot. I was about six, and the next thing he knew, my dad could feel me on his shoulder, staring at her and sucking my thumb. Generally, though, until the eighth grade I'd never thought about girls at all--I'd been doing a TV series and going to school on the set. When it was done, I went to public school for the first time in a year-and-a-half, and there was a girl named Gail Dougherty, the first girl I really saw. I was very short, five feet tall, and she was also short--and gorgeous. I felt it right in my balls. It was immediate. I was just struck. From that moment on, I've always loved women. They're extraordinary to look at and to be with. It took me four months to work up the courage to ask Gail to go steady, and five months after that to actually hold her hand. I think I kissed her once. It was pretty light stuff, but then I became a fast learner from that point on. In high school, I had a girlfriend as a freshman and a sophomore, and another as a junior and a senior. So I only had two girlfriends in high school.
Q: When did you first start having sex?
A: We were both juniors. I had sex once when I was 13, a couple of times when I was 14 and 15. But when I was 16, 17, I started having sex. Trying to get laid.
Q: Did you really, on a high school year-book questionnaire that asked, "Most likely to succeed?" fill in the answer, "I already have"?
A: Yeah, I did. I was going to high school, playing baseball and acting, and almost everybody was envious of what I did. They just were. I didn't care about school. I had a girlfriend and wanted to have sex with her, know what I mean? I didn't want to talk about the things other kids talked about. I didn't share their opinions. I rebelled against my generation. And that had a very long-lasting effect on peoples' take on me, especially in the media. It was a hippie time and I thought a real liberal was great, but the kids in my school were pseudo-liberals, just as they were pseudo-hippies. Most of them were full of shit, trying to find something that somebody else said to latch onto because they were afraid to take a real stand. At that time it was about, "You shouldn't have to get a job, you should just exist." There were people saying go into the woods and be one of the trees, eat the fucking leaves. I said. "This is stupid," Timothy Leary said drop acid, smoke dope and drop out. I said "No, I don't want to do that, I want to hit the inside fastball out of the park and I want to work on movies."
Q: It's hard to imagine a teenager who didn't try smoking dope.
A: I never did, not until I was 32. I still don't understand the reason for smoking dope if you're not going to have sex. To me, drugs have no appeal other than sex.
Q: Is your sex life today as good as it was 15 years ago?
A: Yeah. It's probably better. It's not quite as reckless, but it's deeper, more fun, and I think my dick is bigger [laughs]. I get more out of sex now than I did. I'm having more fun when I'm having sex now. That's because it comes down to one thing...
Q: Love?
A: No. I think love and sex are completely different things. And what's great about Goldie is that she understands that about me, and I understand it about her. What I'm saying is that Goldie feels attractive, and I sense that from her--she likes herself, likes her body, likes her own sexuality. And I like that she likes to give that to me. In doing that, it makes me feel like I'm attractive to her.
Q: Do you think women want men to be dominant in relationships?
A: No. not in relationships. I think women want men to be dominant in sex. That's who I like to have sex with: someone you can share with, and in the end the man becomes powerful. When I get to that point in sex with Goldie, she makes me feel my power.
Q: What scenes in movies did you find sexy?
A: That's a funny story. I took one of the Osmond brothers to see a movie about the Marquis de Sade in 3-D. We were around 18. It was a riot because he wasn't supposed to be there. They were really nice people, and I was just being a shit, gelling him into trouble. And Christ, it was great: tits and ass all over the place, 3-D, they were coming out of our ears. [Laughing] He just didn't know what to make of it. And then, later, when I was in the National Guard, every morning at 5:30 a.m. they always had porno films running. It was a little raw, like hot chili for breakfast.
Then I started to develop an opinion about sex in the movies: I didn't think it was very well done, and I still feel that way. If love scenes aren't pan of the story-telling, I just say no. I know that the audience knows when people are imitation fucking--like in An Officer and a Gentleman, which is why I didn't do that movie--they know if you're faking it. Now, if I know people are watching me faking something, I'm a fish out of water. I don't like that.
I was once supposed to be down on Madeleine Stowe [in Unlawful Entry], but it had to be seen by Ray Liotta, that was the point of the scene. So it worked, because it was telling the story. Meryl Streep and I were supposed to do some [sex] scenes in Silkwood and we agreed to move [them] into the kitchen, which gave it a different color. But that fake humping shit, I just don't believe it. Make it be about something, otherwise I'm watching two people die on-screen.
Q: Is it true that Goldie originally wanted Bruce Springsteen to star with her in Swing Shift?
A: I don't know if it was Goldie or Jonathan Demme, who likes musicians. I don't know how far they went with that.
Q: Do you ever reflect on that? Had he done it, would you and Goldie have gotten together?
A: [Laughing] You'd be asking him about great sex. I met Goldie when I was 15, so I could have started this a lot earlier, but she was way out of my league then. She was older and I didn't have a car, forget it. Fate is fate. If I hadn't done Elvis I wouldn't have met Season Hubley...and I wouldn't have Boston. To stumble onto somebody like Goldie was just a stroke of luck. She is really sexy.
Q: Does your appreciation of her continue to grow?
A: Goldie can do certain things that make me just watch and watch and watch. More so in the last six years than ever before. She's just gotten better and better looking, not only to me, but to everybody. She lets me be who I am and I let her be who she is. We're alike in that regard. I can be with her because she's all women to me. Goldie's like having a buddy who's a girl. It's that good. I'm very fortunate and I'm one of the very few men that I know who is.
Q: Leaving Goldie off the list, who would you consider truly beautiful?
A: For me there's never been a woman more beautiful than Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Marty Short likes to play this game: "If you had to spend one night with any woman--in her prime--who would it be?" And he gives you three choices, like Catherine Deneuve, Michelle Pfeiffer and Grace Kelly. After you pick one, he'll add two more: let's say, Deneuve, then Ingrid Bergman and Marilyn Monroe. Then: Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and Mamie Van Doren. Well, the only one I've never seen beaten is Bardot. No matter who you pair her up with, Bardot wins. The one-night deal is Bardot.
Q: When you and Goldie are at home, ready to watch a movie in the VCR, are there any in particular that you like?
A: Most Sunday nights, over the last three years, we have an open house. Friends come over to eat and talk. Often Bob Towne will bring over two old movies and we'll study them, talk about the director, the actors, the script. Bob Towne is great to watch a movie with. We talk about things we try to capture when we work, and it makes for great conversation. Bob Zemeckis, Marty and Nancy Short, Meryl Streep and Don Gummer, Sally Field, Sly Stallone, Gail Strickland--and other friends who are not in the business--often join us. One time we went over to the Spielbergs and watched The Sugarland Express with Goldie and talked about it. We picked up Sean Penn in a bar one night, came home and talked deep into the night.
I look at those nights as part of old Hollywood, how it must have been for Stewart and Fonda and all those friends to get together 40 years ago and talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. It's made me feel that there's part of this community that I can really feel close to.
Q: So you're proud to be a member of the Hollywood community?
A: At times I take great pride in it. But most of the time I'm completely ashamed of it, especially on the night of the Academy Awards. It's the one night of the year where I just want to crawl in a hole and hide. It's a bit like standing shoulder-to-shoulder with assholes. Mike Nichols and I were talking about politics once and he said, "The thing is, you can't stand shoulder-to-shoulder with assholes." And he's right. I can't. What's interesting about Oscar night is it's a joke--it's about how bad everything is. Everybody knows that that's the night to applaud Hollywood in all its horror.
Q: And yet...
A: There's no other business that can create such enjoyment of life as this business. I love being part of that. Actors have changed my life at times. When people get to know me, I can't tell you how many times they come up to me and say, "You're nothing like what I've read about."
Q: How do you think you come off in print?
A: I think people feel me more than they hear me. I've read interviews I've done and it's exactly what I've said but it's not what I was saying. I have an acerbic, sardonic sense of humor. I'm being facetious 90 percent of the time, but then 10 percent of the time I'm not. So unless I was to qualify everything I say, I'm not going to be understood.
Q: Your opinion of journalists in general has never been very high, has it?
A: As a type of person, they're pretty despicable. They repulsed me in high school, they repulse me now.
Q: How do you think you're perceived?
A: Until recently, I'm generally perceived by the media as a sort of young Charlton Heston. What I think of Charlton Heston is: pro-NRA in the negative ways, Republican in a staunch way, unable in intelligence to get past what you don't understand, and lacking in abstract abilities. Those who know me well know that [comparisons to Heston] could not be further from the truth.
Q: Who do you think you are like?
A: I am like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. I love life. I have a comic outlook, I laugh at myself harder than at anybody else. I get extremely vociferous about things I don't believe in, but I'm in the moment. Benjamin Franklin loved life, he wasn't a negative person. And I do sense that I'm being more perceived like that now.
Q: Given your outspokenness, have you ever considered entering the political arena?
A: No. I'll tell you what, though. The people who laughed at my political beliefs 10 years ago aren't laughing anymore. People like me are voting people who think politically like me into office.
Q: Let's talk about your passion for hunting and where that started.
A: My grandfather owned a hotel along Kennebago Lake in Maine. It had 31 log cabins and was built in 1887. I grew up watching all the guys going out in snowshoes while I played with my sister in the yard, and they'd come back with a deer. And then I got old enough to go with them. I grew up thinking that was the way to live. You could feed yourself, you could have corn in your garden, you could stock things in a barn, you didn't need anybody to do anything. And my grandparents were doing that. My grandfather was a phenomenal shot. And I watched my dad shoot deer, impossible shots when I could barely even see the deer.
Q: Did your first wife, Season, appreciate your hunting enthusiasms?
A: Day before we got married she told me it really offended her and that she was avidly against it.
Q: How does Goldie feel about it?
A: Goldie's a great game cook. We have a party every New Year's Day in Old Snowmass where everybody just watches the football games and they have Goldie's elk stew. We cook as much of the stuff as we can and finish it every time. And she enjoys that.
Q: What's your take on the NRA?
A: I really detest their attitude and what they do, but not what they say. They wanted to pay me to be a spokesman because I had this great plan on using the meal to feed the homeless.
Q: You're talking about those controversial celebrity shoot-outs, aren't you?
A: I created two shoot-outs, in Colorado in 1988 and in Hawaii in 1989. What I wanted to do was show hunting for what it should be shown for, which is providing food. At the shoot-out in Hawaii there were 24 hunters who paid $10,000 each. It was a one-of-a-kind hunt. It was like people who pay to play in pro-am games; these guys paid money to play with celebrities--actors, singers, sports figures. I asked my hunters to give up half their meat and they ended up gladly donating all of it, If I were able to hunt as much as I wanted to. I could never eat all that meat, but there are people who do need that meat and I'd like to get it to them.
Anyway, they hunted for seven days and the meat taken from those 24 hunters was chopped up and put into stews. I went around and got grocery stores to donate potatoes and vegetables needed to make a really good stew. And from that we got 40,000 meals that fed the homeless in Hawaii for almost six months. A guy came to me one day and said that I was being considered for a Nobel Prize. You feed 40,000 people with 24 guys, I think you've proven a point.
Q: Why did you stop the shoot-outs?
A: It was becoming my life--the phone was always ringing. They were trying to work out a thing where I could talk to President Bush about this program that I had developed. But after the last hunt, a couple of people complained about a couple of things and I said, "You know what? It ain't me. I've laid it out there, you've seen how it can work, take it or leave it, I don't care." What I found was, quite a few of the people who were involved didn't want to hunt, they wanted to kill! The animal rights people were absolutely right about them. What I found about the animal rights people was, the hunters were absolutely right about them--they were fucking idiots who didn't know anything about animals! Nothing!
Things have changed now, both sides have gotten a little more educated, but at that time I said to myself, what am I doing? I just want to hunt. By myself or with my brother-in-law or with my dad. That's it. But I'll tell you, few things in my life have given me as much satisfaction as the night I went to Denver to feed these homeless guys. It was cold, it was Christmas Eve, and these guys were lined up. Two or three hundred of them, and they had a look in their eyes that was the real thing. They said, "Man, I'm hungry. Thank you." It kind of put everything in the proper perspective for me.
Q: There were ads in the entertainment trade papers against your shoot-outs, denouncing your hunts as crimes against humanity.
A: Have you ever seen an ad that was more condemning to anybody in a business than that ad? It was Hollywood saying, "Blackball this guy." No other actor has ever had ads taken out in both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter calling for people to not ever work with me again. I was being ostracized, flatout, in black-and-white print.
Even Fatty Arbuckle did what he did with that Coke bottle, and he wasn't ostracized from his community. Not even Michael Jackson received the treatment I did. Never was there an ad in The Hollywood Reporter that said. "Michael Jackson was accused of molesting a minor--he should never work in this town again." That only happened with me. Poor old little me. I went hunting. Which is a legal thing to do. And I fed homeless people. It was a joke! All I can say about this is [laughs loudly and with deep, ironic satisfaction] that after that, my career took off.
Q: Have there been any conversations in the past decade that have changed your life?
A: A year-and-a-half ago, Goldie and my two youngest sisters and their husbands talked to me about my behavior. I was behaving badly, not good to be around, because I was too extreme in my reactions. I wasn't telling people how I really felt at the time, I'd just let it build up inside me, then, in my mind, I'd feel justified to really blow. More than I even knew, I was progressively getting more in the neighborhood of not thinking I had to control myself in any way, in terms of exploding. I didn't have a mother or a father telling me, "Hey, you can't behave that way" -- I was 43, hadn't been parented for 25 years, and I needed a little parenting. I needed to be told, "You can't do that, say that." Well, I can--and have--made those changes. That was the last time I had a conversation that was life-changing.
Q: Is there anything you still want that you don't have yet?
A: Hell. Yeah, It would be fun to have enough money to have a small restaurant where you could have your eclectic group of friends come in and get a good meal and be able to scream and holler, about politics, about anything--and you could be able to afford to lose $200,000 a year on it and it wouldn't make a difference. I'd like to have a jet airplane that I could fly, which would get me back and forth to Aspen inside of two hours, so that Aspen could become a weekend place. I'd like to have enough money to be able to afford some things for my family that I know they could use. Then, too, you know, certain humanitarian things--like, financing a school which could make a difference.
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Lawrence Grobel interviewed Pierce Brosnan for the November 1995 issue of Movieline.