Hollywood’s Snake Plissken doesn’t need your permission to fill his freezer. Kurt Russell, the 74-year-old actor with a career spanning six decades, told a podcast audience he hunts his own elk, and won’t apologize for it.
In a culture that increasingly sneers at self-reliance, Russell’s blunt defense of hunting stands out. It’s a reminder that some corners of America still value the old ways: know where your food comes from, respect the animal, feed your family.
Russell appeared on the “Table Manners” podcast alongside his son Wyatt Russell, a fellow actor who lives in Colorado. As Fox News reported, the elder Russell opened up about how hunting shaped his family’s connection to food.
He didn’t mince words:
“There’s great pleasure and honor in taking an animal that feeds you. And I respect that and honor that. And it means a big deal to me. And you know, I make no apologies.”
Russell also made clear he’s not preaching. He acknowledged that hunting isn’t for everyone but said he grew up in a family that lived that way.
“It’s not something I push on anybody. I mean, it’s not for everybody, but I like bringing down my own meat. I grew up in that family.”
He drew a sharp line between killing and providing. Russell said plainly that there is “no pleasure in the taking of life.” The pleasure, he explained, comes from the honor of feeding people you love with food you earned.
Wyatt Russell backed his father up with an observation that cuts to the heart of modern disconnection. Living in Colorado, he sees wildlife daily, and sees how far most people have drifted from understanding where dinner actually comes from.
“But then you go to the grocery store, and it’s like 90% of the people are just in a pack. They don’t know. They have no connection to food at all.”
He added that growing up in the Russell household meant understanding a simple truth:
“We were raised with it to know that thing that you took is gonna be your dinner meal.”
That’s not cruelty. That’s clarity.
The Russells aren’t alone. Across the Atlantic, a British single mother named Lisa Taylor has built a following defending the same principle. The New York Post reported that Taylor hunts deer and rabbits for food, argues hunting is more humane than supporting factory-farmed animals, and rejects the label of “trophy hunter.”
Taylor told The Sun Online: “It’s no different taking a selfie of your steak in a restaurant, just mine is what your food looked like before it was presented on your plate.”
The logic is hard to argue with. Millions of Americans buy shrink-wrapped meat without a second thought, then lecture hunters about morality. Russell and Taylor flip that script.
Russell also spoke to AARP about aging and what he’s learned over more than 60 years in entertainment. The star who gained fame as a child actor in the 1960s and shares a blended family with longtime partner Goldie Hawn, including four children: Wyatt, Boston Russell, Kate Hudson, and Oliver Hudson, said he doesn’t go around dispensing wisdom.
“God, no. I don’t intentionally, and whatever I impart, I don’t know if it’s wisdom oriented.”
But he also made clear that experience counts for something:
“I do know that after having done this for so long, you keep your mouth shut and your ears open, and you’re going to have learned some things.”
Russell said age has never ruled his life. He still finds the same fun and interest in his work that he always did.
“And I do think that if you do something you really are enjoying, I still don’t feel any different in terms of what I’m doing, in terms of the interest in it, the fun of it.”
Hollywood celebrities usually line up to virtue-signal about the environment, animal rights, or whatever cause their publicist recommends. Russell goes the other direction. He hunts elk. He feeds his family. He says so out loud.
That shouldn’t be brave. But in an industry that rewards conformity and punishes independence, it is. Here’s what Russell refuses to do:
He simply asks to be left alone to live as he was raised. In today’s America, that request alone is countercultural.
When a man can hunt, provide, and speak honestly about it without flinching, that’s not controversy, that’s character. More of it wouldn’t hurt.
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