5 of the Funniest Reasons Actors Turned Down Roles
Actors turn down roles for all kinds of reasons: scheduling conflicts, budgetary constraints, no internal nudity clauses, etc. When you’re successful enough, though, you can start having fun with it and turn them down for hilarious reasons. Such as…
Gene Hackman Didn’t Do Night Shoots
Hackman was the first actor David Fincher considered for the part of Seven’s Detective William Somerset, spending 40 minutes pitching the role to the then-65-year-old star. “It sounds like there’s a lot of night shoots,” he told Fincher. “And I said, ‘Yeah, there is.’ He said, ‘Count me out.’ So that was that.” You have to respect a man who sticks to his bedtime.
Lee Marvin Took Fishing Too Seriously for ‘Jaws’
Marvin also had a great “old man” reason for turning down a movie. During the casting of Jaws, Marvin was Spielberg’s first choice for the grizzled shark hunter Quint, but “he wasn’t interested,” Spielberg told Vanity Fair in 2023. “What I heard was that he wanted to go fishing for real! He took his fishing very seriously and didn’t want to do it from a ‘movie’ boat.” Did they not even consider just filming Marvin hunting a shark for real?
Russell Crowe Doesn’t Know What a Wolverine Is
Crowe was just coming off Gladiator when he was offered the role of Wolverine in 2000’s X-Men, but “if you remember, Maximus has a wolf at the centre of his cuirass, and he has a wolf as his companion,” he explained in 2017, “so I said no, because I didn’t want to be ‘wolfy,’ like ‘Mr Wolf.’” Apparently, no one told him that wolverines are different from wolves, and Wolverine has barely anything to do with either. Instead, he recommended Hugh Jackman, who also didn’t know what wolverines are.
Will Smith Didn’t Get ‘The Matrix’
Smith turning down the role of Neo to make Wild Wild West is the stuff of Hollywood infamy, so in 2019, Smith went into a little more detail about his decision. “Imagine you’re in a fight, and then you, like, jump,” he said in an impression of how he claims the Wachowskis pitched the idea of bullet time. “Imagine if you could stop. Jumping. In the middle of the jump. But then, people could see around you, 360, while you’re jumping. Well, when you stop jumping.” We suspect there was more to it than that, but whatever the case, “robot spiders” were easier for Smith to understand.
Tom Cruise Had Uncomfortable Questions About ‘Edward Scissorhands’
Actors like to understand the day-to-day lives of their characters in order to fully embody them, but we like to think Cruise was coming from the same place as the rest of us overthinking pedants when he was considering the role of Edward Scissorhands. “He wanted to know how Edward went to the bathroom,” screenwriter Caroline Thompson said in 2015. “Part of the delicacy of the story was not answering questions like, ‘How does he go to the bathroom? How did he live without eating all those years?’ (But) Tom Cruise was certainly unwilling to be in the movie without those questions being answered.”
That, or he just wanted an excuse to get out of it, so he pulled out his real skill: making everyone uncomfortable in a way only Tom Cruise can.