'The Shawshank Redemption' Star Tim Robbins Wants You to Know He's Not a Prison Break Expert
Sure, he escaped from Shawshank State Prison more than 20 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that Tim Robbins has any insight on actual prison breaks.
The Oscar-winning actor has been inundated of late with people asking him for his opinion on prison breaks, including one involving two convicts who busted loose in upstate New York last week. Those approaching Robbins aren’t interested in the noted liberal activist’s opinion on criminal justice reform, of course; they’re just hoping his time playing the very patient and very wily Andy Dufresne in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption might provide some sort of insight on the mechanics of busting out of the big house.
“For me it’s a different story: Andy was innocent,” Robbins told Conan O’Brien on Monday night. “I’m not sure whether these guys are guilty or innocent, but a jury’s convicted them. I don’t think there’s much of a story there.”
Related: 13 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘The Shawshank Redemption’
As Robbins noted, Dufresne — a fictional character from the 1982 Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption — was wrongly convicted of killing his wife and her lover. The two men who escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility were both serving life sentences for murders that, by all accounts, they did commit. To be fair to the intrepid journalists asking Robbins about the escape, the two prisoners did use some of Dufresne’s tactics, which included busting a hole through a pipe and crawling to freedom. The real-life New York convicts used power tools — and maybe even saw Shawshank on cable television at some point, where it played for 151 hours in 2013 alone.
The other Shawshank-like story that Robbins gets asked a lot about happened a few months ago, when a man who escaped prison 56 years ago was finally tracked down and caught in Florida. “There was another guy who was just captured after being out on the lam three months ago, and someone came up to me and said, ‘Hey, they caught the Shawshank guy!’” Robbins recalled. “And I was like, ‘No, that was a book by Stephen King. It’s not a real guy.’”
Robbins isn’t the only one who doesn’t like the comparison: One criminal justice professor told USA Today that comparing real-life escapes to a movie desensitizes the public to having very dangerous criminals on the loose. Then again, everyone’s just sitting at home watching The Shawshank Redemption on TV all the time anyway, so they’re avoiding any sort of real danger by being out in public.
