The Natural wasn’t acting: Robert Redford’s on-set baseball skills surprised everyone

On the Rich Eisen show the famous director revealed that sometimes it was hard having Redford play badly when asked to represent the fictional characters’ moments while in a slump. “He’d swing, you know, he’d hit a home run,” he said. “Bob, you just gotta strike out, I mean. You know, because we have about 4000 extras there.”

Eisen agrees with Levinson that Redford was the perfect actor to be cast for the box office hit. “He was a really good athlete so those catches that he was making in the field that was him, there were no doubles,” Levinson said.

The movie was a huge success and one of the best movies ever made about the game. “In baseball and other sports there are these moments that are beyond comprehension. When we talk about sport we sometimes take it a little further,” Levinson remarked about the character played by Redford hitting the cover off of the ball or the lights exploding when hit by the home run ball.

“He hits it you know and the whole thing explodes, like fireworks almost,” Levinson explained. “That was really trying to do a fable.” If you haven’t seen the 1984 movie, you need to and soon, you won’t regret it.

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