Yahoo Lifestyle Warren Beatty Thought He Was Being Offered A Teenager Role At Age 60, And 12 Other Wild Reasons Actors Declined Parts
Oftentimes, actors turn down roles for straightforward reasons, like scheduling conflicts. Sometimes, however, their reasoning is a little more...unusual, to say the least.
Here 13 weird and wild reasons actors turned down roles:
1.After Steve Carell left The Office, James Gandolfini was asked to play the new Dundler Mifflin boss. However, HBO reportedly paid him $3 million to not to take the role.
In 2021, Ricky Gervais told the Talking Sopranos podcast, "I think before James Spader and after Carell, they offered Jim — I want to say $4 million — to play him for the season, and HBO paid him $3 million not to do it. That’s a fact. Jim was going to do it because he hadn’t worked, and it was a number of years removed from when [The Sopranos] ended."
Many actors — including multiple from The Office — played Michael Scott's replacements before the job ultimately went to Rainn Wilson as Dwight Schrute.
2.Tom Hanks declined to play Harry Burns in When Harry Met Sally "because he was going through a divorce, and he was very happy to be not married."
In 2023, his wife, Rita Wilson, told the podcast Table for Two with Bruce Bozzi, "And so he could not understand that a person going through a divorce would have anything other than just like, 'I'm so happy.'"
The role went to Billy Crystal.
3.Prince declined to play Mini Max in Michael Jackson's "Bad" music video because "the first line of that song is, 'Your butt is mine.'"
In a resurfaced interview, Prince told Chris Rock, "Now, I'm saying, 'Who gonna sing that to whom? 'Cause you sure ain't singing it to me, and I sure ain't singing it to you.' So, right there, we got a problem."
Wesley Snipes played the role.
4.Olivia de Havilland turned down the role of Mary in It's a Wonderful Life because she thought it would be "awkward" to play the wife of her ex, Jimmy Stewart.
In 2016, she told People, "It would have meant playing opposite Jimmy Stewart, home from the wars. I knew it would be awkward to work with him because of our many months together in a sort of high school pre-war romance, which came to an end."
The role went to Donna Reed.
5.In 2023, Liam Neeson told The Times that, in the early '90s, he was "very interested" in playing James Bond, but his then-girlfriend, Natasha Richardson, told him that if he accepted the role, they wouldn't get married. So, he chose her over the franchise.
She was concerned about the "gorgeous girls in various countries getting in and out of [Bond’s] bed."
Liam and Natasha got married in 1994 were together until she died in a skiing accident in 2009. He said he used to hum the Bond theme song to get on her nerves.
The role went to Pierce Brosnan.
6.Pierce Brosnan met with Tim Burton about playing the titular role in Batman (1989), but he "just couldn't really take it seriously [because] any man who wears his underpants outside his pants just cannot be taken seriously."
In a 2014 Reddit AMA, he said, "That was my foolish take on it. It was a joke, I thought. But how wrong was I? Don't get me wrong, because I love Batman, and I grew up on Batman. As a kid in Ireland, we used to get our raincoats and tie them round our neck and swing through the bicycle shed..."
Michael Keaton played the role.
7.Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson asked Warren Beatty to play Jack Horner in Boogie Nights, but Paul "realized a couple weeks into it there was a bit of confusion that he thought that [Paul] was asking him to play Dirk Diggler."
In 2018, Paul told Jimmy Kimmel Live, "I sort of realized. 'But you know you're 60?' He's like, 'No, I know, but I think I could do it.'"
Burt Reynolds played Jack Horner, and Mark Wahlberg played Dirk Diggler.
8.Russell Crowe turned down the role of Wolverine in X-Men because of a specific similarity he thought it had to his Gladiator role. In 2017, he told News.com.au, "If you remember, Maximus has a wolf at the center of his cuirass, and he has a wolf as his companion...which I thought was going to be a bigger deal [at the time]. So I said no because I didn't want to be 'wolfy,' like 'Mr. Wolf.'"
However, most of the wolf-related characterization was cut from Gladiator.
He said, "When Ridley [Scott, director] was cutting the movie, it was inconvenient to keep the dog alive — so the whole wolf thing, no one ever mentions it!"
So, he recommended Hugh Jackman for the role.
Russell wasn't the only one to confuse wolverines with wolves.
Speaking on a panel in 2017, Hugh reportedly said that, when he was cast, he didn't know wolverines were real. He said, "I literally, embarrassingly, did about two weeks of research on wolves. I was rehearsing for three weeks, and I was shooting, so I was kind of on my own. I remember going past an IMAX in Toronto, and there was an IMAX documentary about wolves, and so I thought, 'I'll go and see that.'... I literally didn't know [wolverines] existed.'"
9.Despite being offered "so much money" to play Han Solo, Al Pacino turned down Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope because, when he read the script, he didn't "understand it."
Per Variety, during a talk at The 92nd Street Y in 2023, he said, "So I said I couldn't do it. I gave Harrison Ford a career."
Harrison Ford played the role.
10.Sean Connery declined to play Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings because "he read the material and just didn’t get it." However, he didn't reveal the reason he turned it down until years later.
In 2021, New Line Cinema executive Mark Ordesky told the Independent, "We did make an offer to Connery but he said no. We never got an answer until years later."
The role went to Ian McKellen.
11.Per Out, Gale Sondergaard was reportedly supposed to play the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. She did one costume test as a glamorous version of the witch, but she reportedly dropped out after the studio asked her to try a more traditional "ugly" witch look.
Being 40 at the time, she was reportedly concerned that wearing makeup that aged her would hurt her acting career.
Margaret Hamilton took over the role.
12.Lee Marvin was director Steven Spielberg's first choice to play Quint in Jaws, but he reportedly "wasn't interested" because "he took his fishing very seriously and didn’t want to do it from a 'movie' boat."
In the book Spielberg: The First Ten Years, the director said, "What I heard was that he wanted to go fishing for real!"
Robert Shaw played the part.
13.And finally, Ewan McGregor reportedly declined to play Patrick Bateman in American Psycho because Christian Bale called him and told him not to accept the role.
In 2012, Christian told British GQ, "I phoned a few people and let them know my commitment, let me tell you! I called them all and told them it was my role. Don't touch. Step away. Or if you're not going to step away, understand what you're up against."
Of course, Christian Bale played the role.
Which declined role did you find most surprising? Share your thoughts in the comments!
