Kurt Russell (The Thing) The Thing (1982)

Kurt Russell (born March 17, 1951, Springfield, Massachusetts) starred as R.J. MacReady, the helicopter pilot of U.S. Outpost 31, in The Thing (1982). The Thing was Russell's second adult collaboration with John Carpenter and the second of five — Elvis (1979 TV movie), Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and Escape from L.A. (1996). It is generally considered the strongest performance of his career.

Russell came to Carpenter as a Disney refugee

Russell was a child star at Walt Disney Productions through the late 1960s and 1970s, signed to a ten-year contract that ran through the studio's transition out of Walt Disney's personal era. He starred in Follow Me, Boys! (1966), The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), The Strongest Man in the World (1975), and a series of comedies that made him a household name in a register he disliked. The transition to adult roles was difficult; Used Cars (1980), Robert Zemeckis's car-lot comedy, was the first adult role to fully use his sarcastic register. (wikipedia)

His first collaboration with John Carpenter was the 1979 ABC television biopic Elvis, which earned Russell an Emmy nomination and established the working relationship that would carry across the next two decades.

"I gave Kurt the keys. I told him: you are the most important thing in my movies, you are the camera's reason to be there. He took that and ran with it." — John Carpenter, Cinephilia & Beyond (2018)

Snake Plissken made MacReady possible

Escape from New York (1981) gave Russell the persona that MacReady would inherit: an ironic, contemptuous, borderline-feral protagonist with a private code and no patience for institutional authority. Russell developed the Plissken voice — a low, snarled rasp half-imitating Clint Eastwood — for Escape, and the same vocal register carries into MacReady. The two characters are siblings: Plissken is what MacReady would have been if he had hated the camp instead of merely being bored by it.

Carpenter has been explicit that the casting was settled before Bill Lancaster's screenplay was finalized.

"I knew it was Kurt before we had a script. The character has to be the kind of guy who would pour his drink into a chess computer in the first scene and have you on his side. There are five actors in the world who can do that." — John Carpenter, Cinefantastique (1982)

Russell built MacReady around the beard, the hat, and the bottle

Russell's MacReady is a man who has gone deliberately to Antarctica to get away from people. He wears a wide-brimmed slouch hat from the first scene through the climax, carries a bottle of J&B Scotch as a recurring prop, and grows what is effectively the same full beard he wore for the second half of Escape from New York. Russell has said the beard, the hat, and the bottle were the three notes of the part, and that everything else was reaction.

"I worked from the outside in on MacReady. The hat was the thing. Once I had the hat I had the man." — Kurt Russell, The Howard Stern Show (2017 interview, archived at Howard Stern Wiki)

The performance is built on stillness. MacReady is the man who watches; he speaks less than Childs, less than Blair, less than Palmer. The film's most famous line of his — "I know I'm human" — is delivered in something close to a flat affect, with the dynamite providing the emotional volume the line itself refuses.b23

The shoot was physically miserable and Russell loved it

Stewart, British Columbia, where the exteriors were shot, was below freezing for most of the production schedule. Russell has spoken of the shoot as one of his favorite working experiences for exactly the reasons it was miserable for the rest of the cast — the physical conditions did the work the dialogue could leave alone.

"It was the coldest I've ever been on a movie. Wilford Brimley used to wear an electric vest. I refused on principle. Looking back, that was stupid." — Kurt Russell, Variety (2018)

After The Thing

Russell followed The Thing with Silkwood (1983, a Best Actor and Supporting Actor Golden Globe and Oscar campaign for Meryl Streep that he supported), Swing Shift (1984, where he met Goldie Hawn), and a string of major studio leads — Big Trouble in Little China (1986, Carpenter again), Tequila Sunrise (1988), Tango & Cash (1989), Backdraft (1991), Tombstone (1993), Stargate (1994), Breakdown (1997), Vanilla Sky (2001), Death Proof (2007), The Hateful Eight (2015), Bone Tomahawk (2015), and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017).

He has consistently named MacReady as his favorite of his own performances.

"MacReady is the one I'd want to be remembered by. The Thing is the one I'd put on if I had to put one of mine on." — Kurt Russell, Variety (2018)

Selected filmography

Year Film Role Notes
1979 Elvis Elvis Presley TV movie; first Carpenter collaboration
1980 Used Cars Rudy Russo First adult lead
1981 Escape from New York Snake Plissken First Carpenter feature
1982 The Thing R.J. MacReady Carpenter
1983 Silkwood Drew Stephens Best Picture nominee
1986 Big Trouble in Little China Jack Burton Carpenter
1993 Tombstone Wyatt Earp
1994 Stargate Col. Jack O'Neil
1996 Escape from L.A. Snake Plissken Carpenter
2015 Bone Tomahawk Sheriff Hunt
2017 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Ego

Cross-Film Connections

Sources