(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 22 October 2025 17:45, UK
Even though he was one of the biggest stars of his era, you can count the number of objectively great Burt Reynolds acting performances on one hand, at most. That’s not supposed to be a slight, because he knew better than anyone else what he was good at and where he fell short.
A three-time Golden Globe and one-time Academy Award nominee for his big-screen exploits, as well as a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy winner for his televised turns, Reynolds harnessed his charm and charisma to dominate the box office from the late 1970s to the early 1980s without breaking a sweat.
He cracked the A-list by playing slight alterations of the same archetypal character, and when that fell out of favour with mainstream audiences, he was basically doomed. Again, that’s not supposed to be an insult, since he pinpointed the exact moment he realised he’d never be able to reach those same heights again.
If anything, Boogie Nights was a false dawn. It was the best dramatic performance he’d given by far, and the acclaim being thrown his way made it seem like a foregone conclusion that Paul Thomas Anderson would do for his career what Quentin Tarantino had done for others by dusting off a forgotten relic and propelling them back into the spotlight. It didn’t happen, but he was confident he had one last great role left in him.
In a bittersweet twist of fate, that role was released in cinemas just six months before he passed away. It had been a long time since Reynolds had been in anything good, and even longer since he was allowed to stretch his acting muscles, until Adam Rifkin came along with The Last Movie Star, a long-gestating passion project he’d written years previously with the Cannonball Run star in mind.
“I get a call from Burt Reynolds, right? Which was mind-blowing unto itself,” he told Uproxx. “He said, ‘I had just been telling a lady friend that I was hoping for one last great role before the end, and then your script hit my desk.’ And he said, ‘If you had sent this script ten years earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to do it because it deals with things I wouldn’t have been able to face. I wouldn’t have wanted to face them. Today, where I am in my life, I have to do this movie.’”
In the film, the actor plays Vic Edwards, who’s basically Burt Reynolds. The character is an ageing and largely obsolete former Hollywood star who travels to a small town to collect a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to cinema, allowing the leading man to both embrace and poke fun at his highs, lows, ups, downs, and all the baggage that comes with it.
It’s not subtle, with the fictional protagonist having starred in Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance, and Gunsmoke, but it was poignant nonetheless. It was also the best performance Reynolds had given in years, if not decades, and as his final film to hit screens before his death, his farewell couldn’t have been much more fitting.
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