Hello, everybody and welcome to be a unspooled. Hello everybody and welcome to an unspool where we are saluting Robert Redford, who

passed away this week. We want to stop everything and talk about Redford because he has a career

that honestly deserves more than what we can get across in a short mini episode, but hopefully

we can talk about our favorite roles, point towards the movies we've covered really well in depth, and also

just honor the whole legacy of this man who was so much more interesting and complicated than even

you might expect by looking at a guy who just looked like the most handsome surfer to ever become a

movie star. I mean, when you look at his career, right, these are iconic performances. You know,

you go from the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman to the Sting to all the president's men. These are

movies that define an era of filmmaking. They are like blockbuster films that also have like something to say. I mean,

this is, this is a career that is kind of unmatched. Yeah, what I've really been thinking about

with Robert Redford myself, because I've been writing an appreciation for him for the LA Times,

is him as an icon. Like, he is a guy who knew that he looked like the all-American movie star. And in some ways, he was. You know, he's a kid from Santa Monica. His dad was a milkman, which is so all-American. He was a natural athlete. He was great at football. He was great at baseball. And he thought, you know what, this isn't me. I'm more of a weirdo. I'm more of a rebel. He quit sports. He takes up like teenage hot rotting and breaking into people's swimming pools, stealing beer. He's a little bit of a hooligan who knows that his face makes him look like he can get away with anything. And I think he takes that with him to Hollywood. Yeah. And he's so aware of it that I think he's frustrated at certain points because

certain people won't cast him in the roles that he wants to do. And then he spends a lot of time

trying to reinvent himself or do things that are unexpected as well. I mean, right, like we talked when we did our episode on the graduate, that he's really wanted to play the Dustin Hoffman role in the graduate. And instead, Mike Nichols was like, you're too handsome. Nobody's going to believe that you can't get a girl. To which you know what I will say, he absolutely should have had that role in the graduate because then I would understand why Mrs. Robinson would give up her whole life for a guy that she acts throughout the whole

movie. Like he's a totally lousy lay who kisses her at the wrong time. If it was Robert Redford,

fine, I'm going to go there with you. I do think that that seeps into him as a director as well.

I mean, here's a guy who has tremendous success. He goes to make his

first film, Ordinary People. And yes, it is a movie that I think was made for $6 million and made $90 million, which is insane.

But it's also a movie where he actively cast people against type, right?

Mary Tyler Moore at that point was known for doing comedy, TV comedy,

and he puts her in this drama that I think shows the side of her that no one had really ever seen.

And so I love that he came at the casting of that in the way that I think

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