Never ask Robert Redford to watch his own movies. Sure, Robert Redford has directed and starred in some of the best movies of all time — but watching them poses their own challenges. Speaking to TODAY in 2015, Robert Redford revealed the surprising reason why he refuses to watch his own movies.
In the past, Redford has starred in some of the best Westerns and best thriller movies of all time, from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to The Sting. But please don’t make him watch them.
“When I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, it was kind of a rough neighborhood and we were kinda rowdy bunch, and we’d go to movies and we would make fun of the movies we were watching, you know?” Redford told the outlet. “I guess I must have seen myself sitting in the audience, looking at myself. And that might have been one of the reasons [I don’t like watching my own movies].”
Despite his celebrity status, Redford, who is renowned as one of the best actors of all time, has always been adamant about staying humble. He explained why to his grandson in an interview with Walker.
“I had to devise my own way to not have celebrity affect me—to not have it distort my own perspective on things or distort my own personality, or where I would start to take myself too seriously,” he said. “I had to learn that humility was going to be a major component that I wanted to keep in my life.”
“I could see it coming when I first started to get recognized. Around the time of Butch Cassidy, I was suddenly catapulted into a higher category of being recognized on the street. I was seeing my name in print, and it really got to me in the beginning. I started to take myself seriously, and I remember thinking, ‘I’d better be careful here. I’d better be careful not to lose myself with this because now all this attention is being paid to me.'”
He continued, “I created three categories for myself around the idea of success. The first stage is that you become an object. Slowly, you’re not being just you anymore. You’re becoming an object to other people who don’t really know you, and if you’re not careful, you go to the next stage and move from being treated like an object to beginning to see yourself as an object. If you’re not careful there, the third and final category is you will become an object and you’ll completely lose yourself.”
For a fresh take on classical Westerns, check out our Killers of the Flower Moon review.