By Joshua Tyler
| Published
This morning, we lost Robert Redford. The legendary director lived a huge life and died at age 89. His legacy is eternal, for more reasons than we can count. But one of the oddest reasons he’ll live on in our memory is that he’s not Zach Galifianakis.
For years, people have been sharing the following nodding image as a meme…
The image, which shows a husky mountain man nodding, is widely used when people want to show agreement on a specific topic. Most social media users apparently thought this was a clip of Zach Galifianakis, star of The Hangover, appearing in a western.
This morning, after Redford’s death, many news outlets used the mountain man nodding image to commemorate his passing. In doing so, the entire internet learned that that is not Zach Galifianakis, it’s Robert Redford in the 1972 Western Jeremiah Johnson. The collective social media shock was palpable.
Jeremiah Johnson (1972), directed by Sydney Pollack, starred Robert Redford as a disillusioned veteran who retreats to the Rocky Mountains to live as a mountain man. The film follows Johnson’s brutal initiation into wilderness life: building a cabin, hunting, surviving winters, and confronting hostile trappers and the Crow tribe.
The movie was a hit with critics and audiences. It was praised for Redford’s understated performance and Pollack’s authentic depiction of frontier life. It holds a 91% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.7/10 IMDb rating, reflecting that broad approval. It earned money too, over $20 million domestically, which was a strong showing for the era.
The nodding mountain man is definitely not Zach Galifianakis.
Rest in peace, Mr. Redford.
