The director who accused Kurt Russell of wasting his career: “He does too many stupid action films”
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sat 27 December 2025 20:15, UK
Accusing someone who started their big-screen tenure by kicking Elvis Presley in the shins in 1963 and is still going strong today of wasting their career sounds laughable, but Kurt Russell remains a curious case.
Is he a good actor? Yes, and he’s proven it many times. Is he a star? He’s popular enough to have taken top billing in some great films over the years, but that’s part of the issue. In the strictest definition of the term, no, Kurt Russell isn’t a movie star, at least not on the same level as Hollywood’s heaviest hitters.
He’s never played the lead role in a picture that’s earned more than $200 million, and he’s only been listed first in the credits of four flicks that made half as much, and one of them was Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon, which bombed at the box office and lost an estimated $80 million.
Does he look like a star? Yes. Does he carry himself as a star? Yes. Is he treated as a star? Yes. Russell ticks almost every box associated with an A-lister, apart from the fact that he doesn’t have the bankability or track record of commercial success to back it up. Does that mean he’s wasted his career? Absolutely not.
Another flaw in his movie star game is a lack of awards season credentials. A 1983 nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the Golden Globes for Silkwood and a 1979 Primetime Emmy nod for John Carpenter’s Elvis are the sum of his ceremonial accolades, but you don’t spend six decades and change as a constantly employed and perennially popular figure without being very good at the job.
At the other end of the spectrum, look at the films he’s been in: Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Backdraft, Tombstone, Forrest Gump, Breakdown, Death Proof, Bone Tomahawk, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood all run the good-to-great-to-classic gamut, with a couple of multi-billion-dollar franchises thrown in for good measure, thanks to his Marvel and Fast & Furious detours.
It’s a fascinating argument, and one Ron Shelton was all too happy to wade into. The filmmaker, who wrote the part of Crash Davis in Bull Durham with Russell in mind before the studio forced his hand into Kevin Costner, finally got his chance to work with the king of the cult classic in the underrated Dark Blue, and he didn’t think he’d been getting his flowers.
“There’s no question Kurt is underrated,” he told The Morning Call. “Kurt is a fabulous actor. But he does too many stupid action films, so the industry doesn’t take him seriously. He’ll go off and do a movie because he thinks it’s fun. But look at him in Silkwood or Used Cars. That’s a huge range right there. If you judge him by his best work, he’s extraordinary.”
The flaw in Shelton’s theory is that many of those “stupid action films” happen to be either career-defining parts or the actor’s most beloved and timeless work. Russell wouldn’t dream of saying he could have made more of himself, and his legion of supporters who’ve backed him for decades would agree.
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