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Some of the most iconic roles in cinema could have turned out very differently…
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00:00It's well known that the majority of films aren't cast with the director or studio's first choices
00:05for the roles. The sheer number of big budget movies being made means that most will have to
00:09make do with the second or third choice instead. Most of the time this isn't particularly noticeable,
00:14but sometimes when you find out who the role was originally intended for, suddenly it just
00:19makes so much more sense. So I'm Amy from WhatCulture and here are 10 movie roles obviously
00:25designed for other actors. 10. Jerry Maguire in Jerry Maguire
00:30Tom Hanks In recent years, Cameron Crowe has admitted that
00:34his first choice to play conflicted sports agent Jerry Maguire would have been Tom Hanks,
00:39not Tom Cruise. In fact, the role was specifically written with Hanks in mind. However, at the time,
00:45a year before shooting was due to begin, Hanks was focused on developing his directorial debut
00:50That Thing You Do and Hat to Pass. The role ended up going to Cruise, who then spent the next nine
00:55months developing the part with Crowe. The result is iconic, and it might be hard now to imagine
01:00anyone else playing the role. Except for the fact that Maguire's whole feel-good character arc is
01:05quintessentially 1990s Tom Hanks. The cynic with a soft heart, the good guy in a rough patch who just
01:11needs the right inspiration to come out on top. Sandwiched between 1993's Sleepless in Seattle and
01:171998's You've Got Mail, Jerry Maguire is exactly the kind of movie that Hanks was making at the time.
01:229. Ruby Rod in The Fifth Element
01:26Prince
01:28Remember DJ Ruby Rod in Luke Besson's gonzo sci-fi? High camp, high-pitched voice, dressed like he was,
01:34well, high? The part was written specifically for the late Prince. Costumes and props had been
01:39designed with him in mind, even down to the mole on Rod's cheek. Of course, Rod was actually played
01:44by comedian Chris Tucker. The official version of the story is that Prince's touring schedule prevented
01:49him from shooting the movie. But costumer Jean-Paul Gaultier has a different perspective. During the
01:54singer's Paris tour dates, Besson got Gaultier to go and meet Prince and show him some sketches.
01:58Of the experience, Gaultier said, quote,
02:01In broken English and with my strong French accent, I tried my best to make conversation. I showed him
02:06my drawings, but he didn't say a word. I had had a really funny idea for a costume with netting,
02:12through which quite long body hair would pass through, and I had done the front and back versions
02:16of it. So I explained this to Prince. And viewers, I apologize, I'm about to do a really bad French
02:21accent, but trust me, it has a point, it's going somewhere. So I explained to Prince, uh, it is fake air,
02:27you know? The back is made of that. The back, uh, the Foucault. Uh, a very big, uh, Foucault.
02:34End quote. And yes, I promise that was a quote. He explained that Prince gave him an odd look and
02:39then left without a word. And Gaultier later found out from Besson that Prince had pulled out of the
02:43movie stating that the costumes were a bit too effeminate, and that he wasn't best pleased with
02:48Gaultier's lack of respect. And here's where the bad accent comes in. It turns out that where Gaultier
02:53had been saying Foucault, meaning fake ass, Prince had instead heard the words F*** you. So yeah,
02:59you can't really blame a guy too much for pulling out of a movie where his first meeting with the
03:03costume designer, he thought he was repeatedly being told to go f*** himself.
03:088. Dolores Wilson in Sister Act, Bette Midler
03:12When screenwriter Paul Rudnick pitched the movie that would later become Sister Act to producer Scott
03:17Rudin, it was with veteran actor and Broadway singer Bette Midler in mind. Midler, however, passed on the
03:22film, convinced for some reason that her fans wouldn't want to see her play a nun.
03:26It made no sense. Dolores wasn't a nun, she was a brassy lounge singer forced to masquerade as one.
03:33Sister Mary Clarence is only Sister Mary Clarence while she's in witness protection,
03:37and she uses her showbiz instincts to transform the fortunes of the convent's choir.
03:41The part wasn't just written for Midler, it was made for her.
03:45Well, we all know how it goes from there. Eventually, the film went to Whoopi Goldberg,
03:49and it also went through so many writers and so many drafts that Rudnick requested
03:53he be credited with a pseudonym, as it no longer resembled the movie he pitched.
03:57You know what survived the rewrites though? Dolores Wilson, aka Sister Mary Clarence,
04:02and that movie was a huge hit. I, for one, am glad Whoopi Goldberg got the part.
04:087. Bruce Willis in What Just Happened, Alec Baldwin
04:12That's right, the role where Bruce Willis somewhat famously plays a douchebag version of himself,
04:17wasn't actually written for Bruce Willis at all. Writer Art Linson and director Barry
04:22Levinson's Hollywood satire follows Robert De Niro's stressed-out film producer Ben from
04:27set to boardroom to set, amongst many other memorable moments. It features a subplot in
04:32which Bruce Willis turns up to shoot Ben's movie with an impressively luxurious beard which he refuses
04:37to shave off, despite it being completely inappropriate for the part. Well, that part was
04:42originally intended for Alec Baldwin, because it was actually based on Alec Baldwin himself.
04:46You see, What Just Happened is a fictionalised retelling of the stories from Linson's own
04:51memoir of the same name. In his book, Linson recounts Baldwin turning up to a shoot in 1997
04:56with an impressively luxurious beard which he refused to shave off. Baldwin's character was
05:00a fashion photographer whose plane crashes in the wilderness. His having the beard at the
05:04end of the movie made sense, but having it from the beginning made no sense whatsoever.
05:08Baldwin didn't quite see this though. In the end, Baldwin had to be threatened with being fired from the
05:13movie and sued by the studio before he actually agreed to shave it off. De Niro, who was also a
05:18producer on the film, had originally approached Baldwin to play himself, thinking his famously
05:22prickly friend might have developed a bit of a sense of humour about the whole thing. Judging by the
05:27fact that Willis was cast in his place, I think we can all confidently say no such sense of humour had
05:32been developed.
05:346. Russell Hammond in Almost Famous
05:37Brad Pitt
05:38Writer-director Cameron Crowe wrote the script for Almost Famous with Brad Pitt in
05:42mind for the pivotal role of Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond. Not only that,
05:47but he also managed to secure Pitt for the role, working with him for over four months in developing
05:51the character. However, Pitt pulled out of the film before shooting could begin, and Crowe rather
05:56frankly admits that he cried when he found out, worrying how it might look for his career.
06:00Billy Crudup was cast in his place and did a fantastic job in a career-making role. There's even an
06:05argument to be made that Pitt, an established movie star by that point with a ridiculous level of
06:10cool, wouldn't have been able to deliver the vulnerability or the callousness that Hammond
06:14exhibits. Nonetheless, there are multiple references in the finished film to Hammond being too good
06:19looking and a golden god, and these lines were very clearly intended to be delivered by the blonde,
06:24god-like looking Pitt.
06:265. Peter Weyland in Prometheus
06:29Max von Sydow
06:31Ridley Scott's long-awaited return to the Alien franchise began life purely as a backstory to his
06:36original film. The initial thoughts on what this film should look like were very different from
06:41how it actually turned out, and at one point it was going to quite heavily involve an elderly Peter
06:46Weyland, the founder of the Weyland Corporation. He was meant to be a man of advancing years,
06:51seeking to use his vast fortune to stave off death. Originally, Scott had legendary actor Max von Sydow
06:57in mind to play Weyland. He was 86 at the time, which is age-appropriate for the role. However,
07:01a subsequent draft of the script called for a younger version of Weyland to appear. Weighing
07:05up the alternatives, it was decided to go with the equally formidable but considerably younger Guy
07:10Pierce, who could appear au naturel in the flashback part of the story and then be aged up with makeup
07:16for his other appearances. Pierce was cast, and the production proceeded, and then a further draft of
07:20the script cut the flashback sequence entirely, leaving Scott with the prospect of Pierce
07:23Pierce playing a character twice his own age for no good reason. With an actor of Pierce's calibre,
07:30it's not the worst thing in the world, but the old age prosthetics the team used sort of did make
07:34him look like a mummy at times. Moral of the story? Maybe they should have stuck with Max.
07:404. Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part III, Winona Ryder
07:44The Godfather Part III is over 30 years old now, and a lot of critical narratives have grown up around
07:50this movie. You know them by heart, it was too rushed, there wasn't a story, Francis Ford Coppola
07:55did it purely for the money, it didn't live up to the quality, blah blah blah. One thing almost
08:00everyone agrees on, though, is that Sofia Coppola, the director's daughter, was a disastrous choice
08:06to play pivotal plot point Mary Corleone, the daughter of the trilogy's protagonist. The critics
08:11savaged her performance in a way that almost felt too personal. She was called vacant and wooden,
08:16they said she didn't know how to perform on camera, and that her line delivery was childish.
08:20Of course, the fact is that Coppola hadn't intended to cast Sofia, he hadn't even intended to make the
08:25film until he was made an offer he couldn't refuse. With only 20 months to go from a blank page to a
08:30premiere, Coppola drew the best possible cast and crew around him. No one could say no to The Godfather,
08:35and that included Winona Ryder, who was perfectly cast as Mary Corleone. That is, until, having filmed
08:41three movies back to back, she pulled out due to nervous exhaustion a day before she was due to
08:46begin filming. Coppola didn't have anyone else except Sofia he could bring in to play Mary at such
08:51short notice, and he couldn't just rework the schedule, he was already pushed for time. That, in turn,
08:56led to one of the most notorious miscast roles in Hollywood history, and it's one that he's regretted
09:01for about 30 years. 3. Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park
09:07Harrison Ford From the late 80s to the mid-90s,
09:10Harrison Ford was the biggest leading man in Hollywood. If a script had a male lead role over
09:1545 years old, then they took Ford first, because if he said yes, their project would get an immediate
09:20greenlight. Of course, even a workaholic can't be in everything, and Ford has never been a workaholic,
09:25so he almost always said no. And that's exactly what happened with the role of Dr. Alan Grant in
09:30Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, a role which was not so much written for him as modelled on the
09:35character that had made him a star. No, not so much Han Solo, though there could be elements of
09:40that, I guess. We're talking about Indiana Jones. If you check out the painted concept art that
09:44Spielberg had knocked up at the pre-production stage, the guy running away from the T-Rex with
09:48the two kids is the spitting image of Ford's rugged archaeologist. And that is not a coincidence.
09:54In retrospect, you can kind of see why he turned it down. Grant is a rough-and-ready prehistory geek,
10:00a paleontologist with a gung-ho attitude and a cool hat who spends half the movie running away from
10:04elaborate special effects. It's basically everything he spent half of the 80s doing,
10:09and you can't blame a man for not getting too excited at the prospect of doing it all over again.
10:142. Bloodsport in the Suicide Squad
10:16Will Smith
10:18During interviews in the run-up to the Suicide Squad's release, both James Gunn and star Idris Elba
10:23were keen to dismiss rumours that he'd been hired to replace Will Smith's Deadshot. Since it was a while
10:28before Elba's casting was attached to a specific character, the initial assumption was that the part of
10:32the hitman Floyd Lawton had been recast. Warner Bros were very keen to publicise that this wasn't the
10:37case, no doubt to ensure that Smith, arguably the biggest star, remained on the radar to return to
10:42the role in a potential threequel. After a bunch of rumours about different characters being introduced,
10:47it turned out that Elba was playing Gunn's version of DC's Bloodsport, aka Robert Dubois. The thing is,
10:53Elba's Dubois is Smith's Lawton. They're both bad-tempered gunmen and reluctant team leaders with a
10:58sinister metallic full face mask. And, like Deadshot, Bloodsport even has a daughter who is, like
11:04Deadshot, the only good thing in his life, an addition to his character that only exists in Gunn's
11:09movie. Then let's look at the timeline. Smith announced that he wouldn't be returning at the
11:13end of February 2019. Gunn's shooting schedule was set in stone and Smith was already booked.
11:18Elba was announced to be in talks to join the cast a week later, and by this time Gunn had already
11:23written several drafts of a script that Warner Bros were reportedly high on. It seems obvious that
11:27those drafts included Deadshot. Peter Safran has all but admitted this in an interview last July.
11:32What it looks like from the outside is that they were going to recast Smith with Elba,
11:36but then panicked over losing their relationship with Smith, forcing Gunn to think on the fly and
11:40bring in a new character. However, given the huge similarities between the characters,
11:45it was less of a last-minute rewrite and more of a find-and-replace job.
11:501. Everyone in Blowdry
11:53Blowdry is a case study in the horrors of studio micromanagement. There may be no other film in
11:58history where the entire cast were all clearly intended to be practically anyone other than who
12:03they were. It's fair to say that 20 years ago, Oscar-winning screenwriter Simon Bofoy didn't have
12:08the Hollywood clout that he probably enjoys today. Bofoy's first feature was The Full Monty, an
12:13unexpectedly massive comedy about laid-off Sheffield steelworkers who form a male stripper troupe.
12:18The film featured a cast of virtual unknowns, most of whom came from the north of England,
12:22but when he attempted to duplicate the trick with his script for Never Better, this time being about
12:27rival hairstylists in Yorkshire, Bofoy found his film placed with Miramax and the infamous Harvey
12:32Weinstein. Suddenly there were lists of Hollywood-famous actors flying around, mostly over his head.
12:38Even the director had little control over who was cast, which is how a movie supposedly about the
12:42authentic lives of working-class northerners ended up with pretty much no cast members from the north. I mean,
12:48there was Londoners, there was Australians, there was Americans, and all of them absolutely
12:52murdered the Yorkshire accent. The result was, to put it mildly, horrible. Unable to fix it,
12:58Bofoy bowed out to make room for another writer, but since the whole point was to play up the
13:02connection with The Full Monty, he wasn't even allowed to remove his name from the film. Instead,
13:06in a towering moment of English passive aggression, he asked for his credit to read,
13:11based on the screenplay Never Better by Simon Bofoy. Probably would have been even better if
13:15he had managed to get them to preface it with very loosely. And on that note, we've reached the
13:21end of this list of 10 movie roles obviously designed for other actors. If you've got any
13:25more in mind then let us know in the comments down below, and remember to check out WhatCulture.com
13:29for more lists and articles like this every single day. As always, I've been Amy from WhatCulture,
13:34and I'll catch you next time!
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