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Credit: Far Out \/ Apple TV+<\/p>\n
Tue 28 July 2026 19:45, UK <\/p>\n
Having been a working actor since 1963, when he debuted by booting Elvis Presley in the shins, Kurt Russell<\/a> is more entitled to a break than many of his peers, most of whom haven\u2019t been working almost nonstop since childhood.<\/p>\n However, that doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s been too interested in taking one. In fact, the longest he\u2019s ever gone without appearing in a feature was the five years between his Disney swansong in The Strongest Man in the World and his return as the new, improved Kurt Russell in Robert Zemeckis\u2019 Used Cars in 1980, but he wasn\u2019t entirely absent from the screen.<\/p>\n In the intervening years, the star popped up in four TV shows and five made-for-television films, including his Primetime Emmy-nominated turn as the title character in John Carpenter\u2019s Elvis<\/a>, so he\u2019s kept up a remarkable pace for a guy who\u2019s more than 60 years deep into his life as a professional thespian.<\/p>\n Up until the mid-2000s, Russell had only twice gone two consecutive years without a big-screen credit to his name, but when he did it the third time, he was gone for almost half a decade. Fortunately, it revitalised his creative energy, and when he finally returned from his longest-ever sabbatical, he became a fixture once more, racking up all of his biggest hits in the process.<\/p>\n It may not have been by design, but when Quentin Tarantino\u2019s Death Proof wrapped shooting<\/a> in December 2006, it would be a while before audiences saw him again. By his own admission, he got distracted, with the king of the cult classic falling in love with doing something that wasn\u2019t acting or playing baseball for the first time in his life.<\/p>\n \u201cI did Death Proof with Quentin, and after that, I did get very interested in something that I had been wanting to do for a long, long time, and that was make wine,\u201d Russell explained. \u201cI wanted to learn to make a specific wine, and I wanted to learn how to make pinot noir and chardonnay.\u201d That\u2019s fair enough, with his GoGi brand providing a nice line of supplementary income.<\/p>\n Beyond that, there was nothing from Hollywood that tickled his fancy, with the star admitting that \u201cwhat I was spending my time doing in the vineyard was more interesting to me than the screenplays I was reading.\u201d During that period, he \u201cjust wasn\u2019t reading things that I had been wanting to do, so it was kind of easy to just say, \u2018I\u2019d rather do this for a while.’\u201d<\/p>\n Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n For whatever reason, writer and director Don Handfield\u2019s script for Touchback was what lured him back. It wasn\u2019t very good, hardly anybody saw it, and it barely made more than $200,000 from cinemas, but the formulaic sports flick is at least notable for ending the longest exile of Russell\u2019s career when it premiered in September 2011, almost five years after his last day on the Death Proof set.<\/p>\n Still, it was a fairly sporadic return, with The Art of the Steal the only other movie he made between 2006 and 2015, at which point he was back with a vengeance<\/a>, whether it was reuniting with Tarantino, joining the Marvel and Fast & Furious franchises, fighting Godzilla, voicing Papa Smurf, playing Santa Claus, or any of the other eclectic things he\u2019s been up to since he came back in from the cold.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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<\/a> The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter<\/p>\n