How Burt Reynolds Ended Up In Deliverance Over Jack Nicholson

Given his limited budget, John Boorman hired Burt Reynolds to play Lewis in "Deliverance" for $50,000 — 1/10th of what Nicholson was demanding. Despite such little investment, the payoff was big. "Deliverance" not only earned $46 million worldwide against its paltry $2 million budget, it scored three Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Boorman. The film catapulted Reynolds to the A-list, and within five years he was starring in such hits as "The Longest Yard" and "Smokey and the Bandit."

However, "Deliverance" did come at a big cost for Reynolds, physically. The "Deliverance" scene Reynolds regrets filming the most happened when he insisted on taking a canoe down a waterfall himself instead of using a stuntman, resulting in a cracked tailbone when he hit a rock and almost drowning when he was swept into a whirlpool at the bottom.

Discussing his film "The Last Movie Star" with the Chicago Sun Times in 2018, Reynolds seemed to adapt the harrowing river incident on "Deliverance" as a metaphor for his existence: "The river has much to with my life, my career — you just keep going on. It's going to try and drown you and beat the [expletive] out of you and do everything else. But you just keep going on ... And maybe there's a rock ahead that's going to hit you."

He took precautions with the "The Last Movie Star," though, where the older version of Reynolds is digitally inserted into movie scenes with his younger self — including a canoe scene from "Deliverance."