Most actors remember their first day on a movie set as a blur. This one remembers getting paid to kick Elvis Presley.
Well, technically it was his character who got paid. In the movie, Elvis’s character hands a little boy 50 cents to give him a good kick in the leg. The idea was to make a girl his character liked take pity on him.
The boy in that scene grew up to be one of the most familiar faces in Hollywood.
It was Kurt Russell.
He was just 11 years old, and the movie was “It Happened at the World’s Fair,” the MGM picture Elvis made in 1963. It was Russell’s very first big-screen role, and his big job in that scene was to kick the King in the shins.
Russell told the whole story on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” in March 2026. As he put it, “he pays this kid 50 cents to kick him in the shins.”
The grown-ups on set weren’t so relaxed about it. Elvis wore a pad under his pants leg, and everyone was a little nervous about the King getting banged up. “He had a pad on him and everybody was a little bit worried about it and they said, ‘Now, kind of go easy,'” Russell remembered.
There was one more small problem.
“And I had shoes, not sneakers.”
So the boy kicked. And kicked again. Russell says he did it “about 10 times” before Elvis was happy with the take.
Then Elvis gave his verdict on the new kid. “Elvis was like, ‘I think he’s got it. I don’t think I’m too worried about that,’ you know?”
Those lines are even better coming straight from Russell, so here he is telling it in his own words.
Kurt Russell telling Seth Meyers about kicking Elvis
Elvis didn’t only care about the scene, either. Russell has also remembered Elvis noticing a man on the set and asking him, “Is that your dad? Is that your father over there?”
It’s a small thing. But for an 11-year-old on his first movie, having Elvis Presley stop and ask about your dad is the kind of thing you hang onto.
You can see the finished scene for yourself, with little Kurt in action, in this short clip from the movie.
The movie scene where young Kurt Russell kicks Elvis
Russell has told this story before, too. Years earlier, he shared it on The Graham Norton Show, and it’s fun to compare the two versions.
Kurt Russell telling the shin-kick story on The Graham Norton Show
Now here’s where the story comes full circle.
Sixteen years after he kicked Elvis in the shin, Kurt Russell played Elvis himself. The TV movie was called simply “Elvis.” It was directed by John Carpenter, and it aired on ABC on Feb. 11, 1979.
If you’ve seen that 1979 movie, you’ve watched the same kid from that shin-kick scene, all grown up and playing the man he once kicked for 50 cents.