In 2000, Donald Sutherland appeared alongside his fellow Hollywood veterans Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and James Garner in the action adventure movie Space Cowboys. The actors were aged between 54 and 72 at the time, and all four of them famously exposed their naked backsides in one particular (ahem) moon-based scene.
“It’s magnificent. There’s 250 years of ass up there on the screen,” Sutherland told Entertainment Weekly at the time. This was a different experience to one that he had during his heyday of the 1970s. During that decade, Sutherland starred in such hits as Kelly’s Heroes, MASH, Klute, and horror movie Don’t Look Now.
When making the smash hit comedy movie National Lampoon’s Animal House in 1978, John Landis needed a ‘name’ to offset the fact that he was banking everything on the new, young and extremely unpredictable SNL star John Belushi. So, he recruited his old friend Sutherland for a day’s filming as a professor. Sutherland’s cameo role also involved exposing his butt. “That shot… wasn’t supposed to be in the movie,” Sutherland protested to EW. “This one [in Space Cowboys] I knew was coming.”
Unsurprisingly, Eastwood, Jones, Garner and Sutherland got somewhat competitive over who had the best butt. “Not his,” insisted James Garner to EW, referring to Sutherland’s derriere. “I have the best of the bunch.”
Sutherland turns 88 years old in July 2023, and he’s still acting, with one of his most recent roles being the disaster movie Moonfall. Sutherland has 200 IMDb credits to his name, but is maybe best known to the younger generations as Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games movies.