As tributes roll in for Hollywood legend Burt Reynolds, who died of cardiac arrest Thursday in Florida, a Chattanooga native in the film industry says he feels like he’s lost an old friend, though he’d only known the actor for a couple of years.
Richie Walls, a producer on the Tennessee-made film “The Last Movie Star,” says he first met Reynolds on-set in Nashville in 2016.
Warner Bros.Burt Reynolds, left, in “Deliverance,” the film he once said was most quoted by fans. The line he heard most often? “You got a mighty pretty mouth.” (Warner Bros. photo)
Burt Reynolds is shown here in New York on March 14, 2018. Reynolds, a wryly appealing and self-mocking Hollywood heartthrob who carried on a long love affair with moviegoers through performances that could often be more memorable than the films that contained them, has died, a spokesman said on Sept. 6, 2018. He was 82. (Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)Co-star Ariel Winter (of “Modern Family”) “had come in a couple of days before, and I’d met her, but I didn’t meet Burt until he stepped out of the Lexus,” Walls says.
“It was the experience you would imagine it to be,” he says of Reynolds’ movie-star persona. “He was like he was in the movies, the coolest guy on Earth.”
Reynolds was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood during the 1970s and ’80s, with a string of successful movies including “The Longest Yard,” “Deliverance” and the “Smokey and the Bandit” flicks.