Kurt Russell added to the spectacle of the O.J. chase

Last Updated on January 26, 2024

Imagine you’re in the middle of watching Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon try to outscore each other in game 5 of the NBA Finals when all of a sudden your broadcasters cut to O.J. Simpson slowly engaging in a police chase. Imagine further that you’re now so invested in the chase that you couldn’t possibly pull yourself from the TV. And who is that you see but Snake Plissken. That’s right, Kurt Russell has direct ties to the O.J. Simpson chase which came a few days after the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman.

As Kate Hudson told Jimmy Kimmel, the family lived near Simpson’s home at the time and Kurt Russell found his opportunity to be part of history. “It was the big chase. And Kurt…O.J. was on the 405 and Kurt all of sudden just went, ‘Oh, he’s going home’ Next thing you know, he gets in the car and he leaves and he goes to O.J.’s house. I don’t know why! Just to see what happened, you know? And we’re all like, ‘Where are you going?’ He’s like, ‘I’ll be right back.’ And then he goes with his friend…Literally, we’re watching the news because we’re watching the NBA Finals, it was interrupted. And we saw our dad on television behind the caution tape.”

That’s wild enough, but as Kurt Russell’s son Oliver added, there were far more infamous figures that his old man encountered. “He had a run-in with Ted Bundy” sometime after his prison escape, with the serial killer allegedly eating Russell’s food while he was camping. Oliver Hudson, too, claimed that “he beat up…Tex Watson, who was Manson’s right-hand guy,” although Kate seemed a little skeptical on that one…Details on that story are even slimmer, but we hope he gave him the what-for à la Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – a movie Kurt Russell acted in. We wonder if he shared that story with Tarantino…

Later that year, Kurt Russell would lead Stargate to a nearly $200 million worldwide gross. So we’ll just go on and assume this was some sort of viral marketing.

But Kurt Russell isn’t the only celebrity with ties to the Manson Family, as fellow Disney Legend Angela Lansbury saw that Charlie and company were having too great of an impact on her daughter and so moved her family to Ireland. There is no evidence that she shared campfire beans with Ted Bundy.