Legendary Hollywood actor Kurt Russell opened up earlier this week about his love of hunting during an interview with the podcast “Table Manners” and was unapologetic when asked if he was “sentimental” about animals.
Russell, 74, was being interviewed alongside his son Wyatt, 39, on Wednesday. While he was discussing the best way to serve elk meat, co-host Lennie Ware interrupted him.
“So, you’re not sentimental about animals then?” she asked.
“Well, I thank them for their service,” Russell quickly replied, causing the group to erupt with laughter.
“By the way, there’s no pleasure in the taking of life,” he explained. “There’s great pleasure and honor in taking an animal that feeds you. And I respect that and honor that. And it means a big deal to me. And you know, I make no apologies.”
Wyatt, who lives in Colorado, supported his father’s point of view and exalted the beauty of hunting.
“One of the things that we’ve really forgot, especially my children, growing up – you see those things run through your backyard and you see all kinds of animals, and they’re majestic,” he said.
“But then you go to the grocery store, and it’s, like, 90 percent of the people are just in a pack,” Wyatt continued. “They don’t know. They have no connection to food at all. And so it’s very nice. We were raised with it, to know that thing that you took, is going to be on your dinner table.”
Despite his passion, Kurt admitted that hunting isn’t for everyone, but added that it’s normal for him, because he was raised with it.
“It’s not something I push on anybody,” he said. “I mean, it’s not for everybody, but I like bringing down my own meat. I grew up in that family.”
When asked to name a “nostalgic taste” from his life, the “Hateful Eight” and “Tequila Sunrise” star said, “That would be easy for me. Again, if it were venison, I’d remember when I was a kid in Maine, in the log cabin” with his grandfather.
Russell was recently in the news for promoting his new Apple TV streaming show, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” and his Paramount+ neo-Western, “The Madison,” which led to a discussion about his cult classic film, “Tombstone.”
He’d previously compared the screenplay for “Tombstone” to that of “The Godfather,” but lamented how script changes and industry politics altered the finished product.
“That’s because of the screenplay. The movie is not as good as the screenplay,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
When asked if he had come to terms with this, Russell said, “I’ll never make peace with that. It could have been way better. It’s considered one of the great Westerns, right? It could have been considered one of the great movies. It had a great cast, but it had fabulous writing.”
“And for a lot of different reasons, the money got burned through, and the director thing didn’t work out,” he continued. “So we had to go about it differently, and we got what we made. The impact of ‘Tombstone’ is very strong, and that’s nice. That’s great. But could it have been a lot better? Yes.”
“The Madison,” which was originally conceived as a spinoff to the hit Paramount show “Yellowstone” — both created by Taylor Sheridan — follows a New York City family in the Madison River Valley of central Montana.
Season one currently holds an 83 percent rating on the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes, while “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” holds an 82 percent rating.
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