Credit: Far Out / Paramount Pictures
Sat 8 August 2026 21:45, UK
There’s often a clear distinction between an actor and a movie star, and as desperate as Robert Redford was to be taken seriously as the former, through no fault of his own, he was pigeonholed as the latter.
For his entire career, all he wanted to do was make the movies he wanted to make, and more often than not, those movies weren’t big-budget, mainstream pictures designed to make a killing at the box office. There were a couple of those, but Redford was more focused on challenging himself as a performer.
However, because he was really, ridiculously good-looking, carried himself like a superstar, and possessed a natural charm and screen presence that no amount of acting lessons can teach, he was anointed as a heartthrob, sex symbol, and one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s most desirable figures.
He wasn’t best pleased about that, although first-world problems don’t come much worse than being too damned handsome for your own good. Unlike most of his peers, Redford resisted the lure of the easy paydays, franchise gigs, and mindless blockbusters, even if there were a couple of exceptions along the way.
Indecent Proposal was one of them, and that was a deliberate, calculated move. Spy Game was another, but Tony Scott’s thriller at least had some meat on its bones. He even joined Marvel, with the Academy Award-winning director sharing that the driving force behind his appearances in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame was that he wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
At no point in his professional life did Redford ever play a conventional action hero, nor did he ever take top billing in a straightforward, gung-ho action flick. He brought down a White House incumbent in All the President’s Men, but he never embodied the commander-in-chief himself. He could have, had he not turned down Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One.
One of the biggest hits of 1997, and one of the decade’s most purely enjoyable actioners, Harrison Ford publicly thanked Kevin Costner for the chance to play James Marshall, with the latter opting to tank his career with The Postman, while the former got the chance to tell Gary Oldman to get off his plane.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
However, what’s less well-known is that Redford rejected it first. Why? According to the man himself, “It felt like it was approaching a cartoon,” and that wasn’t what interested him. It absolutely was approaching a cartoon, but what else do you expect from a movie about an ass-kicking president who takes down a terrorist cell mid-flight?
“You either bring the audience in, or you go out and hammer them in the face to get their attention,” he explained. “That seems to be the general state of things. That’s just not as appealing to me.” Redford was a man of principle, but his and Costner’s loss was undoubtedly Ford’s gain, with Air Force One becoming the most successful non-Star Wars or Indiana Jones film he’d ever been in, and one of the best.
