7 Reasons Why Famous Actors Were Turned Down for Roles
Hollywood is an unforgiving place and even the most high-profile and talented actors get rejected for roles on a fairly regular basis.
Take a look at why these 7 celebs were turned down for roles in movies.
1. Andrew Garfield
Garfield wanted to play Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia but…get this…he was told he wasn’t handsome enough for the role.
Wow…
The role went to Ben Barnes who Garfield said is, “a very handsome, talented man. So in retrospect, I’m not unhappy with the decision, and I think he did a beautiful job.”
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2. Robert Redford
The veteran Hollywood star vied for the lead role in The Graduate but director Mike Nichols told Redford he wasn’t right for the part because “you can never play a loser.”
Redford tried to convince Nichols but he ended up casting Dustin Hoffman.
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3. Brenda Song
Song says she wasn’t allowed to audition for a role in Crazy Rich Asians for a very strange reason…
She wasn’t Asian enough…
“A lot of people don’t know this, but I never got to read for Crazy Rich Asians, ever.
Their reasoning behind that, what they said was that my image was basically not Asian enough, in not so many words. It broke my heart. I said, ‘This character is in her late to mid-20s, an Asian American, and I can’t even audition for it? I’ve auditioned for Caucasian roles my entire career, but this specific role, you’re not going to let me do it?
You’re going to fault me for having worked my whole life?’ I was like, ‘Where do I fit?'”
Director Jon M. Chu disputes that this ever happened, for the record.
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4. Robin Williams
The late Robin Williams was interested in a couple of different roles in the Harry Potter films but the folks behind the films ended up wanting to go with a completely British cast.
“Robin would have been brilliant [as Lupin]. It would have been a different interpretation.”
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5. Sean Young
This one is a little bit different…
Young was originally cast to play Vicki Vale in 1989’s Batman but she was replaced by Kim Basinger after she broke her arm.
A few years later she showed up at Warner Bros. studios dressed as Catwoman but studio execs didn’t offer her the role.
“If these Warner Bros. executives now were really good businessmen, they’d let me play Catwoman today, and I’d make a smash amount of money. But they’re too stupid.
You can lead people to water, but you can’t make them great artists.
Nobody wants to take that risk, it’s too scary.”
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6. Tom Holland
Holland couldn’t stop laughing during his audition for the character of Finn in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens and the role ended up going to John Boyega.
“I was like four or five auditions in. … I remember doing this scene with this lady, bless her, and she was just a drone.
So I was doing all of this, like, ‘We gotta get back to the ship!’ And she was going, ‘Bleep, bloop bloop, bleep bloop.’ I just couldn’t stop laughing. I found it so funny. And I felt really bad, because she was trying really hard to be a convincing android or drone or whatever they’re called.
Yeah, I obviously didn’t get the part. That wasn’t my best moment.”
Ouch…
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7. Freddie Prinze, Jr.
Prinze was being considered for the lead role in Spider-Man in 2002 but claims that he blew it in a meeting with director Sam Raimi.
Prinze said that when Raimi asked him what he loves about Spider-Man, he said,
“I go into this whole like universe of what my favorite parts of Spider-Man were, and I foolishly bring up the alien symbiote, which is Venom, right.
When I left, I literally was like, ‘You just talked about Venom instead of Spider-Man for 25 minutes you stupid a–hole,’ and I drove home so upset and angry.”
The role, as you probably know, went to Tobey Maguire.
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