The 2006 movie role that sent Kurt Russell into Hollywood exile

Credit: Far Out / Apple TV+

Tue 28 July 2026 19:45, UK

Having been a working actor since 1963, when he debuted by booting Elvis Presley in the shins, Kurt Russell is more entitled to a break than many of his peers, most of whom haven’t been working almost nonstop since childhood.

However, that doesn’t mean he’s been too interested in taking one. In fact, the longest he’s ever gone without appearing in a feature was the five years between his Disney swansong in The Strongest Man in the World and his return as the new, improved Kurt Russell in Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars in 1980, but he wasn’t entirely absent from the screen.

In the intervening years, the star popped up in four TV shows and five made-for-television films, including his Primetime Emmy-nominated turn as the title character in John Carpenter’s Elvis, so he’s kept up a remarkable pace for a guy who’s more than 60 years deep into his life as a professional thespian.

Up until the mid-2000s, Russell had only twice gone two consecutive years without a big-screen credit to his name, but when he did it the third time, he was gone for almost half a decade. Fortunately, it revitalised his creative energy, and when he finally returned from his longest-ever sabbatical, he became a fixture once more, racking up all of his biggest hits in the process.

It may not have been by design, but when Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof wrapped shooting in December 2006, it would be a while before audiences saw him again. By his own admission, he got distracted, with the king of the cult classic falling in love with doing something that wasn’t acting or playing baseball for the first time in his life.

“I did Death Proof with Quentin, and after that, I did get very interested in something that I had been wanting to do for a long, long time, and that was make wine,” Russell explained. “I wanted to learn to make a specific wine, and I wanted to learn how to make pinot noir and chardonnay.” That’s fair enough, with his GoGi brand providing a nice line of supplementary income.

Beyond that, there was nothing from Hollywood that tickled his fancy, with the star admitting that “what I was spending my time doing in the vineyard was more interesting to me than the screenplays I was reading.” During that period, he “just wasn’t reading things that I had been wanting to do, so it was kind of easy to just say, ‘I’d rather do this for a while.’”