The Burt Reynolds Look-alike

For one brief, mustachioed moment, Roy Tatum ’68, a stalwart defensive tackle for Auburn in the mid-1960s, was—true story—the world’s premier Burt Reynolds look-alike. At least according to Aunt Billie and her favorite tabloid.

Tatum graduated in 1968. After taking an insurance job in Atlanta in 1970, he began dabbling in modeling. He took some acting classes at Emory University, signed on with a talent agency and got some portfolio photos. Aunt Billie, who had billed her nephew as a dead ringer for the Hollywood star Reynolds for years, was thrilled.

“She said ‘send me a picture of you,’ so I sent her a picture,” Tatum, who passed away in 2023, told the author in a 2017 interview. “I said, ‘what are you going to do with this?’ And she said ‘well, there’s a newspaper down here called the National Enquirer.’”

Tatum had never heard of it. But the man who called him a month later sounded real enough. Stuart Lichtenstein was a top publicity rep for the Enquirer, which had recently started holding celebrity look-alike contests. And he told Tatum he’d never seen a better Burt Reynolds.

“He said, ‘of all the pictures we have, yours looks more like him than anyone else’s,’” Tatum said. “I thought he was pulling my leg.”

The picture, which won Aunt Billie $25, ran in the paper’s Jan. 20, 1974, issue. The 15 minutes didn’t stop there. Lichtenstein flew Tatum to Los Angeles for an episode of The Merv Griffin Show. Tatum walked out and the audience erupted. They thought he was Burt Reynolds. He knew that was a big deal. He didn’t realize how big until he got back to his hotel room.

“My agent called and she said, ‘I’ve got half a dozen calls here for you to work, to do jobs,’” Tatum said. “I was like, ‘you got to be kidding me, Kathy.’ I did some national commercials and stuff, and they played off the similarity, but it was never my intent to wander around America posing as Burt Reynolds.”

But, sometimes, he just couldn’t help it. Like that time in Opelika.

Tatum ultimately parlayed his 15 minutes into a brief movie career that included a role as a mill boss in, yep, “Norma Rae.” When the cast broke for dinner on his first day on the Opelika set, a squealing mob was outside waiting, and not for Sally Field.

“I walked out there and all the gals came,” Tatum said. “I’m not saying… they’re just assuming—because Sally Field was there—that I’m the guy [Burt Reynolds].”

Reynolds and Field had just started dating. That he was popping into town to see his new girlfriend was no secret.

“There’s, like, 15 girls there,” Tatum said, “They’re wanting autographs, and I’m like, how am I going to get out of this?’”

Tatum was used to stares, especially out in L.A. But he could usually convince his waitress—except that one in Montgomery that time. “Just don’t tell anyone I’m in town,” he finally told her. Or the person sitting next to him on the plane, that his name was, in fact, Roy Tatum. This was different. He adapted.

“I gave them what they wanted,” he said. “But instead of writing Burt Reynolds, I wrote Bart Raynolds.

“I mean, I wasn’t going to forge the man’s name.”

By Jeremy Henderson ’04