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Home > People, TV > Lee Majors revisits ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ and his most classic of roles

Lee Majors revisits ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ and his most classic of roles

Lee Majors has lived in Los Angeles for many moons, but it’s this time of the year when he really misses his old Kentucky home. “You get the seasons and all,” he says. “It makes it feel like Christmas when Christmas comes. Here, it’s just sunny and palm trees, and it doesn’t feel like the holidays.” He did receive one particularly hefty early Christmas present recently, that being the awesome 40-disc The Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Collection DVD box set. Available online at TimeLife.com, the set is a must-have for disco-era kids who grew up playing with their friends as astronaut-turned-secret agent Steve Austin and the adults who still to this day make that cool bionic noise whenever running in slow motion. It’s packed with ’70s-era goodness, from commentaries to new interviews with Majors and The Bionic Woman star Lindsay Wagner to all six movies and every episode of the five-season series. But Majors isn’t resting on his cybernetic laurels. “I’m still working so wherever they’re filming, that’s where I’m going,” says the actor, who also made his mark in the 1960s series The Big Valley and with kids of my generation as stuntman Colt Seaver in the 1980s show The Fall Guy. I talked with him recently about The Six Million Dollar Man and his more than 40 years in show business, so read below for our extended conversation.

Photos courtesy of Time Life


When you go back and look at old episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man, what’s the first thing that pops in your mind?

When I was doing the show, first of all, you work so many long hours and I had just come off of three other series and went right into this. And when I finished that, I went right into Fall Guy. I wasn’t quite aware of how really big the show was. I knew it was in like the top 10 or something, but you just keep working and the producers keep putting the whip on you. I did Fall Guy to try to get away from it, to take some shine off so you don’t get typecast in a certain box. But there comes the box again. [Laughs] Anyway, Fall Guy didn’t quite work as well as I thought it might, even though we did five years of that. I just remember [Six Million Dollar Man] as a lot of hard work, but now in the last probably 10 years, I’ve been able to do some other traveling around the world and stuff. I’ve found you go to in the middle of nowhere in the Phillipines, and they say, “Oh yeah, we used to all come down to the village on Friday nights!” It was the only TV they had to watch. I’m sure they watched other shows, but they all say that was one of their favorite shows.

And you were in your acting prime back then, too.
When I did one of my first shows ever when I got into acting, I remember the director said to me, “Lee, you’ll never make it in show business unless you learn to keep your left eyebrow down.” Well, little did he know, if you look at The Six Million Dollar Man, I think that was his trademark: The left eyebrow was generally up. [Laughs] I don’t know why, it was just a habit. But I did take him in earnest for a while and I was doing The Big Valley, and the director would come over after the scene we had just finished: “That’s real good, you were concentrating, you were there, I could see you were thinking.” And I was thinking in my head, “Yeah, I was thinking really hard to keep my left eyebrow down. That was my motivation in the scene!” [Laughs]

What struck me rewatching Six Million Dollar Man episodes now was all the running you did.
Tell me about it. My knees are killing me today.

How much did your athletic background help when it came to all the physicality needed?
It paid off tremendously. In The Big Valley, my first series, I had to learn a lot. I could ride a horse, but I went in and got into the calf roping and I probably did 90 percent of my own stunts. They were fun to do and it made the day go quicker. Five years of that show doing that stuff kept me in pretty good shape, plus we had a flag football league that the producers didn’t know anything about. Luckily, I didn’t get hurt. They didn’t want you doing stuff, yet I was still doing all these stunts for them. They didn’t care about that.

The kids from the ’70s had Six Million Dollar Man, but us children of the ’80s had The Fall Guy.
That was my favorite show because it gave me a chance to do a little more with the character, be a little funnier and we had a great cast. I was a co-producer on that and I was able to cast a lot of friends and great, great people in parts. I got a crew where if you didn’t want to have fun and do your work also at the same time, then you were gone. We had quite a team there who made it fun. Like, “Monday Night Football at 6 o’clock, guys. We’re outta here at 6 so let’s get the work done.” We’d still have our fun and practical jokes, but we had a well-oiled machine.

There are some humorous moments with you as Steve Austin, though. Obviously it was funnier because he’s so earnest.
You know, you try to put a little humor in here and there, but it just wasn’t written that way. You had to do it personally as the character would allow it. That’s why Fall Guy was so much better. I could add a lot of ad libs and stuff, which was cool. It was a pretty serious show and the humor just wasn’t written there. You had to put it in when you could. But it was a great family show. It was something that you could sit down with your 5-year-old and on up in the ages there and watch with. If you remember, most of the time before that, there were just so many Westerns, and this was a little ahead of its time also as far as the technology goes. As you can see today, since they’re doing so much with he technology. There are troops coming home and getting heart replacements and going right back into the field. It’s amazing.

The theme song from The Six Million Dollar Man series is still very recognizable for people. What I didn’t realize was the original TV movies after the pilot featured a soulful, girl-group song. Which did you prefer?
The original pilot was OK. The second one, the writers went more to a James Bond kind of character, and they had this glitzy theme sung by Dusty Springfield that was kind of jazzy. I didn’t feel that that’s the way we should go. When we went to the series, I wanted to play the character down and have him be more of an antihero and have more relationships and be more of a likable character. That’s what those shows were. We didn’t kill anybody, there was no blood on our shows. I didn’t carry a gun, didn’t shoot anybody, and most of the time if you had fights with people, they’d be getting up as you were leaving the scene. Nobody was left for dead. And of course, there were two years we went where I didn’t have a romantic love interest. I’m saying to the producers, “Look, I’m getting tired of looking at these hairy-legged guys walking around the set. Get some girls in this thing!” It could also be a girls’ show, too. That’s how the Lindsay Wagner thing came up with the Bionic Woman story. As silly as I was at the time, I even wrote a long song for Jaime. I think they used it in that episode. I haven’t gone back to view it because I’d be embarrassed. [Laughs]

The Bionic Woman spun off and became a hit, too.
Studios are funny. You can see with all the tentpole franchise movies they make, but it was the same back then. Like in the ‘60s, if you like Westerns, we’ll give you 17 Westerns. And if you like The Six Million Dollar Man, we’re gonna give you The Bionic Woman. They tried to do The Bionic Boy, another Bionic Woman, and then they came to me and said, “We have this Bionic Dog named Max…” I said, “Well, let me tell you. You take Max over to the Bionic Woman show because I’m not having the Bionic Dog on my show.” [Laughs] They wanted to do a bionic thing every five minutes. Of course, we did one in ’89 in Toronto and she was going to be the next Bionic Woman in one of those reunion movies. She worked for 2,500 bucks for guest-starring, and it was Sandra Bullock. God help her, I’m glad that show didn’t go and spin her off because she’s done quite well and she deserves it. She was a fine little actress.

They did try to reboot The Bionic Woman a few years ago rather unsuccessfully.
See, that’s where they went wrong. If you look at the original Bionic Woman and that one, in the original one Jaime was kind of soft and had feelings and relationships. Then you cut to this last one and it was so dark. Blow up this and blow up that, and she walked around like she wanted to kick butt every minute. It was too violent. Of course, that’s what happened with our youth of today, more or less. They’re being influenced by so many video games that have all the violence in them. Now all they have to see is explosions and things getting blown up and people getting killed. It’s not the way I was brought up, but I guess every generation is its own. I grew up watching Westerns with Roy Rogers, and my heroes always wore the white hat and it was different.

If they were to reboot your show, I guess it would have to be The Six Billion Dollar Man at this point. You know, for inflation.
Somebody told me what it was the other day. It wasn’t nearly that much. It’s still in the millions. [Laughs]

It’s also neat that you’re doing the voice for General Hawk on the new G.I. Joe Renegades cartoon.
I only did three or four shows. It’s fun to keep your hand in some of the young stuff. A couple of years ago, I did Ben 10 and I played the grandfather. They sent me on a little tour to London and the Philippines, and you should see all these kids who watch this cartoon thing. They had these premieres of this two-hour movie in the theaters and all these kids were out there. I had the little boy and the girl who are in the movie, but gosh, now I’m Grandpa Max, which is good.

You’ve also appeared on Human Target and Community. Do you like where your career’s at now?
I like being able to go and do three or four weeks and do a weird character and such. That’s why I like doing these independent films where you can go and do characters. If you’ve done seven or eight series, you’ve got to realize that’s only seven or eight characters. Most of the time, they were the good guy and you had to stay in that character for five years. Now, you can go and play a bad guy or an older fella, but it’s more interesting for me.

Because we’ve seen you so much as the hero, is it weird for you to play a bad guy?
I don’t take the roles that are really, really bad, or the blood-and-guts kind of stuff. He’s bad but it’s not scary or bad bad. There’s a difference. [Laughs] I just finished reading this script that Syfy has that we’re kind of rebooting. It’s called Me and Lee, and it’s bionic in nature. It’s good for Syfy and they’ve never done comedy, but it still has some of the sci-fi stuff in it. It’s hilarious. I play myself. It’s about a kid who’s down and out because he lost his dental practice when he almost severed someone’s tongue and he’s had a bad back. He’s had two operations, he doesn’t have any money left, he’s losing his girlfriend because he can’t have sex because of his back. I stalk him out in an elevator and convince him to come to my house and rebuild him. He’s really scared of me, but I eventually do get him to come home. It’s a mansion in Beverly Hills, but it’s dilapidated and gone downhill a little bit. I take him into the cellar and I have this beautiful bionic lab and this surgeon/chef. We put new arms and legs on him, put all my money into this. We refit him, but we put eyeball cams in so we can see what he sees. It’s really hilarious.

Can you recall a particularly crazy day when doing Six Million Dollar Man, or one where you were just like, “I can’t believe I’m doing this”?
There are a couple of days I can remember, [like in the Bigfoot episode] working with Andre the Giant in the woods and it’s 110 and it’s a bright sunny day and he’s in that outfit and we’re doing this fight scene. We have a break and I see him over in his chair sitting there, and he’s slugging down a six-pack in one shot without stopping, crushing the cans and throwing them away. They say, “OK, we’re ready to do the next shot,” and he comes over and he’s supposed to pick me up and throw me about 10 feet. Anyway, he picked me up and threw me about 20 feet, and I said, “Oh God, now he’s going to jump and land on me.” I’m looking up and all of a sudden the sun disappears and I can feel him coming down, and I’m thinking, “I’m going to get crushed.” He didn’t touch me, he was a professional wrestler, but 7-4 and 400 pounds and you put him in that outfit, that’s scary. And you know what, I never saw him go to the bathroom all day long with all those beers he was drinking.

Got another one?
There was another one, and I wonder why I did it. In Palm Springs with the tram, there was a scene where the cars were stuck between towers and there were some kids in there. I had climbed up a tower and got out on the wires to get to them. My stuntman was wonderful, but he had some problems with heights, as some people do, and he brought in another guy who was supposed to do it. He walked around all day, and after lunch somehow he got sick and wasn’t able to do it so I ended up having to do it. I’m up on those wires, and about 10 feet from the car, I really froze. The camera’s stationed on top of the car where I’m headed, and I just didn’t know whether to go back or forward. Then I looked down 250 feet, and I see the stunt guys are taking pictures. That [ticked] me off enough that I made it! I didn’t even smoke and I asked the guy for his cigarette. I went back there recently with my wife Faith and went up there just to see it and reminisce a little. I’m looking down and I said, “Whoa, boy, was I stupid or what? No way should I do that.” You’re a little invincible when you’re young.



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