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Some things you just can’t get rid of: herpes, the U2 album that auto-downloaded to your iPhone and, if you’re Burt Reynolds, a nude centerfold from a 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan.
“It was really stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Reynolds, now 80, said of his most famous photograph during an interview with AOL’s “What to Watch” at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. “I really wish I hadn’t done that.”
The manly spread — which features a 36-year-old Reynolds smoking a cigarette while lounging, sans clothes, on a bearskin rug — hit newsstands just as Reynolds’ iconic film “Deliverance” was about to hit theaters.
“I have to be truthful, I was totally zonkered when I did the picture,” he continued in the interview. “That stupid smile, that’s what it is, you know.
As long as it was only a certain amount of pubic hair showing, I was all for it.”
The centerfold was a success; Cosmopolitan sold 1.5 million copies of the issue.
Reynolds attended SXSW to promote “The Bandit,” a documentary about the making of Reynolds’ 1977 flick “Smokey and the Bandit.”