Burt Reynolds felt embarrassed by his naked magazine photo and referred to himself as an ‘egomaniac’ for stripping naked – regardless of the fact that he was intoxicated at the time.

The actor, who died on Thursday at the age of 82, revealed that the hubbub around the nearly naked photograph for Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan magazine left him perplexed.

Reynolds takes up two full pages of the magazine’s April 1972 edition. He has a sneer on his face, a limp cigarillo dangles from his lips, and a furry bearskin rug is tucked beneath his equally fuzzy body. His arm is deliberately positioned in front of his “tallywacker,” as Reynolds called it afterwards. He picked the photograph that featured in the magazine.

Burt Reynolds on Why He Agreed to Be One of the First Men to Pose Nude for Cosmo https://t.co/xSC3jjv5Fo pic.twitter.com/07x604a5cP

— Cosmopolitan (@Cosmopolitan) September 6, 2018

In an interview with Steve Harvey earlier this year, the actor stated that he didn’t believe the 1972 move would be a big deal. He was mistaken; it turned him into a great sex symbol.

‘I didn’t know there was going to be a commotion about it,’ he told Harvey in March. ‘It wasn’t a big deal to me. I said, “I’ll do it, but I’ll have to have my hands…in front of me.”’

Reynolds, then making a joke about the size of his manhood, added, “And I have very small hands.”

“What an egomaniac that would do something like that,” he told Katie Couric in 2017, and added, “I didn’t have to do that. But people thought you had to do it because it, you know, caused a little fuss and all that and I enjoyed that, but I didn’t enjoy doing it.”

In March 2018, he admitted to Conan O’Brien that he was quite inebriated for the shoot.

‘I was so drunk,’ he said. ‘Oh I was plastered. I started drinking very early in the morning, and I went out and they said, “In the first scene you’ll be doing such and such.” I said, “You said I’d just be lying on the couch… I’m not taking my clothes off. I’ll come in, throw the robe off, and you roll.” And he did.’

Reynolds also said in his biography, My Life, that he found it peculiar how ladies reacted to him when the April 1972 edition hit the stands.

“Standing ovations turned into burlesque show hoots and catcalls,” he wrote. “They cared more about my pubes than they did the play.”

Regardless of his change of heart, Reynolds will be remembered as a man who played a crucial role in Gurley Brown’s lifetime goal to bring women’s sexuality to the public’s attention.

Burt’s 911 call has been revealed since his death, stating that he was ‘having difficulty breathing and chest pains.’

The caller responds: ‘He had a bypass a few years ago.’

Emergency services then confirmed an ambulance had been sent to Reynolds’ home.