Looking tough and comfortable in jeans, T-shirt and boots, a chain-smoking Kurt Russell sprawled on a small chair in the office of an L.A. publicity firm that once represented his girlfriend, Goldie Hawn. Although then onscreen in Silkwood and now appearing in Swing Shift (co-starring Hawn), Russell does not like to overdo his press exposure. But according to Contributing Editor David Rensin, who sat opposite him, "He quickly began to enjoy himself, firing off opinions on everything from the foibles of his generation to the designated-hitter controversy. He also seems very much in love."

Q 1

PLAYBOY: Many actors have gotten political mileage out of the nuclear controversy. After your role in Silkwood, is it an issue on which you take a stand?

Kurt Russell: Not really. I've learned some technical things from Silkwood that have slightly altered my opinion on the subject. But I'm still a great believer in nuclear power plants. It's a perfect sort of energy, only there are two problems. The first--to make the plants technically correct and safe by following all the rules and regulations--can be solved. The other problem is not immediately solvable. Nuclear waste is put into plastic bags and stuff and is buried and is alive and radioactive for 250,000 years! We just don't know if we have anything that can contain it for that long. So what we have is something with great potential on which we haven't yet closed the book. We don't know how to put this monster to sleep. Until we do, we shouldn't play with it. However, I have tremendous faith that we can find a way.

Q 2

PLAYBOY: Compare real life and the movies.

Kurt Russell: There is no comparison. The fun in films is when every so often you can hit that magical spot of being so real as to create the illusion that it's real. That's what is to be admired, not the reality of what is being watched. It's a fine line. The idea is to tread that line, and any movie that can is most satisfying to me. Whether or not Silkwood dealt with real life--whether or not we tried to do it as close to real life as possible--is irrelevant. It's still only a movie. But the appreciation level changes according to how real you can be, and I try to be as goddamn real as I can. I want to suspend the audience's reality.

Q 3

PLAYBOY: You did that with your critically acclaimed portrayal of Elvis. Where did it all go wrong for him?

Kurt Russell: I'd worked with him and knew him, but I won't pretend to understand Elvis' life or to know how much of the various biographies are true. I really don't care. His story is long and complicated, but one thing is explainable: At a certain point in life, he realized there was nothing he could do wrong. People were not going to let him not be Elvis. He was Elvis no matter what. And that's probably the most horrible thing to realize. Whatever void that leads to is probably impossible to fill.

Q 4

PLAYBOY: How do you handle your high-pressure job?

Kurt Russell: I disagree with the assumption. There's no pressure at all in this business. Pressure is the winning run on third base and you at the plate and 40,000 people screaming and then you getting jammed by the pitch and grounding out weakly to third and everyone groaning and booing. The Olympics is pressure. Politics at the high-stakes level is pressure. Medicine, where you've got a guy on the operating table who's going to live or die by what you do, is pressure. Standing in front of a camera and getting deeply involved in exposing another person is not pressure. It's interesting and fun and sometimes disappointing. But not pressure.

Q 5

PLAYBOY: When did you finally get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work?

Kurt Russell: On a paper route I had when I was nine. I got up at four A.M. and finished at 6:30. I must have gone to 60 or 70 houses. After a month, when I went around and collected my money, I knew why. I had the paper route because I wanted ten-speed bikes for me and my sister. After six months, I realized that it would take me two years of delivering papers. That's how I got into acting. My dad [former baseball player and actor Bing Russell] was up for a picture that Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were going to be in. It had a part for a ten-year-old. I thought, This is it! I could meet Mantle and Maris and make enough to buy both bikes with only about six weeks' work. I called my dad's agent and went on the interview but didn't get the job. But I discovered that I enjoyed the interview--which I hadn't expected. Eventually, I did get some work on a TV show called Our Man Higgins. I liked it and I figured that I'd just keep going, make a few bucks and see what happened.