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Michael B. Jordan blamed his failed Star Wars audition on a vague script.
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00:00Whether you're just getting started or you're a Hollywood headliner, movie auditions are a reality
00:04for every actor. However, even the best of the best can end up getting these completely wrong
00:08and end up with an audition that completely crashes and burns, often through impressive
00:14and hilarious acts of self-sabotage. And these are excuses actors used for blowing major movie
00:19auditions. Mark Strong went on a drunken bender with Daniel Craig, a Pierce Brosnan James Bond
00:26film. Though Mark Strong didn't actually confirm the specific role outright, he did state that it
00:30was a villain in one of Pierce Brosnan's four James Bond films. In an interview with Sky One,
00:35Strong admitted that a celebratory night out on the town caused him to blow his chance at becoming a
00:40Bond icon during an audition the next day. He said, quote, I learned the lines and to celebrate I went
00:46out for a drink and I got pissed. I overdid it and then the next day I was severely hung over. I started
00:51then I just forgot my lines, couldn't remember what they were and they all just kind of fell apart.
00:57I was sweating. It was a terrible experience but I really learned from it, end quote. The kicker
01:01though is that Strong's drinking buddy for the night was an actor who would become synonymous with 007
01:05a few years later. He said, quote, the irony was the guy I was out with the night before getting pissed
01:11with was Daniel Craig so I blame him, end quote. It is an incredible story and as much as Strong gets
01:16pigeonholed as a villain these days, he absolutely would make an incredible Bond baddie and better still,
01:22nowadays he probably wouldn't even need to audition for it.
01:25Tom Hiddleston gets the Pirates of the Caribbean script just before a night out.
01:30While it can be a touch frustrating to have to suddenly drop everything you're doing and immerse yourself
01:35in the world of a character for hours, the chance to have your life forever changed by one out of nowhere
01:41audition is certainly worth that small sacrifice. That's something eventual Loki star Tom Hiddleston
01:47learned the hard way, when some sides for a new little franchise by the name of Pirates of the
01:52Caribbean landed on his lap many moons ago. With the young actor promising his pal that he'd go out
01:58for a few drinks to celebrate them finishing their exams, Hiddleston eventually decided to pack the text
02:03away for the night after only a few hours of prep. Inevitably, the severely hungover and underprepared
02:09performer didn't produce his best work at the 10am audition the next day. And when asked why he didn't
02:15even bother to learn the lines for such a massive opportunity, a naive Hiddleston simply told the
02:21casting director that he only got the script at 5pm the day before. He's since learned that this is no
02:27excuse, the silly boy. You gotta take those opportunities by the balls.
02:32Jake Gyllenhaal's agents didn't tell him he needed an English accent, The Lord of the Rings.
02:36Jake Gyllenhaal was among the many young actors who auditioned for the role of Frodo Baggins,
02:41and though Gyllenhaal presents himself as a pillar of confidence these days, back in the late 90s he
02:46was still a teenager with just a handful of roles to his name. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon,
02:50Gyllenhaal confirmed that he flubbed the audition big time, citing one key reason, that his agents
02:56were so excited about scoring him the audition that they actually forgot to tell him that the part
03:00required an English accent. As a result, Gyllenhaal performed the whole audition in his own American accent,
03:06prompting Peter Jackson to offer him some brutally honest feedback and calling him the worst actor
03:11he's ever seen, and then advising him to fire his agents for failing to tell him about the accent
03:16requirement. Gyllenhaal's career obviously flourished regardless, and had he won the Frodo role,
03:21the world would have been robbed of his unforgettable work in Donnie Darko.
03:24Bradley Cooper couldn't help turning into Christian Bale's Batman in his Green Lantern
03:29audition. If it wasn't for an incredible performance from Christian Bale as the legendary
03:34Caped Crusader, Bradley Cooper feels he probably wouldn't have fumbled his chance to play the
03:39Green Lantern on the big screen. Before Ryan Reynolds eventually found himself in the horrendous
03:44CGI suit as Hal Jordan, Cooper read for the part too, and it was during that meeting when the star
03:50simply could not help putting on a Bale Batman voice once he donned the character's mask.
03:56Cooper would also reveal on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien that not even being told to speak in
04:01a normal voice beforehand could stop his backed sense from coming out during the scenes.
04:06Then after having a quick look at the performance he'd just produced on the monitor in the room,
04:11a rather embarrassed Cooper soon felt that his audition, one that looked like a Saturday Night Live
04:16sketch in his opinion, wasn't going to be enough to wrestle the part away from Reynolds, who Cooper
04:21admittedly claimed he would have cast if he was directing the film anyway.
04:25John Krasinski was intimidated by Chris Hemsworth's physique, Captain America The First Avenger. When he
04:30was still working on The Office, John Krasinski auditioned for Captain America, and in an interview
04:34with Graham Norton spoke about the excruciating audition process. Though he insists he was a fringe
04:39choice for Cap, he actually got far enough along to try on the Captain America costume and perform a
04:44screen test. Krasinski though said the audition fell apart when he encountered Thor himself,
04:49Chris Hemsworth, on the studio lot while putting on the costume. The scantily clad Hemsworth,
04:53bulging muscles and all, greeted Krasinski and immediately made him realise that he wasn't
04:58nearly the physical specimen necessary to play Cap. Though he ultimately did go through with the
05:03audition, his confidence had clearly been knocked by crossing paths with Hemsworth, and the eventual part
05:08went to Chris Evans. A few years later however, Krasinski would get into phenomenal shape for the 2016
05:13Michael Bearthorn, 13 hours. Salma Hayek was too lazy for the Matrix
05:18According to Salma Hayek herself, there was just one thing getting in the way of her and a part in
05:24the iconic first Matrix movie. She was lazy. Yep, we can all relate. As the Desperado star would
05:31explain during an appearance on the Red Table talk show, after jumping through many hoops in the
05:35audition process, the various ladies competing to appear in the Wachowski's flick as Trinity were put
05:41through a physical test. This consisted of a bunch of stunt coordinators from Asia coming in and
05:47putting the women through their paces. However, despite noting how she was certainly flexible
05:51and agile, Hayek felt that her inability to run around the room once without gasping for air
05:57was the main reason she didn't end up scoring a role in the franchise.
06:00George Clooney went full method by getting drunk, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Clooney has stated in an
06:06interview that he was supposed to play a drunk guy in Dracula, but it isn't quite clear whether
06:11he's referring to a nondescript bit part or if he was in fact auditioning for Dracula himself,
06:16as went so fittingly to Gary Oldman and simply had to play drunk for the audition. Whatever the
06:21part though, Clooney ballsed up the audition in a major way by deciding to go full method. He said,
06:26quote, I got really drunk to do it because I thought that was the best way to do it, end quote.
06:30Sadly, Francis Ford Coppola didn't much care for this approach, and post-audition the legendary
06:35filmmaker even contacted Clooney's agent to inform them that he showed up to the audition wasted.
06:40Of course, fame came well and truly a knocking for Clooney a few years later though, when he won
06:44the role of ER's dreamy, Dr. Doug Ross.
06:46And Jamie Campbell Bower's dirty joke didn't help him land the Harry Potter part.
06:51Jamie Campbell Bower was actually one of the many hopeful youngsters who tried out for the role of
06:56the boy who lived. And after being told to prepare a little joke for his meeting with director Chris
07:02Columbus, this confident lad felt he had just the gag to secure one of the hottest parts in the
07:07business. Bower recalled to the Happy Sad Confused podcast how he had heard a particularly filthy joke
07:13about why a fairy sits on top of a Christmas tree, with that cheeky joke focusing on the fact,
07:18you know, the plant was stuck up the thing's bottom. Sure enough, when it came time to deliver
07:22his rude fairy story, this potential Harry Potter was met with complete and utter silence.
07:28And in this future young Gellert Grindelwald's opinion, it was that crude one-liner that royally
07:34effed up his chances of putting on the legendary spectacles.
07:38Robert Pattinson tried and failed to pretend he was American.
07:41Transformers Revenge of the Fallen. Shortly before his career exploded with the role of vampire
07:45Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies, Robert Pattinson tried out for this small supporting
07:49role in the second Transformers film as Sam Witwicky's roommate Leo, and claims himself
07:54to have given an audition so bad it nearly cost him his agent.
07:57In an interview with MTV News, Pattinson explained that he spent the audition pretending that he
08:02was an American actor, despite the casting team being well aware that he was in fact English.
08:07He said, quote,
08:08I thought I was being funny. I was saying I was from somewhere in America, because I always kept
08:12thinking that if you say you're English, then they judge your American accent. But they knew I was
08:17English, so they were listening to my backstory about being from Denver, and they were like,
08:21what is this guy on? End quote. It all worked out for the best, though. Twilight made Pattinson an
08:25overnight megastar, and rich enough to start pursuing quote-unquote worthier acting projects in its wake.
08:30Mark Maron had no idea what was going on, and didn't want the part in his Avatar audition.
08:37When talking on that podcast again, Happy Sad Confused, about his surreal experience meeting with
08:42the legendary director for a part in the then-upcoming follow-ups to the Pandora smash hit Avatar,
08:48Glow star Mark Maron openly noted how the entire thing was ridiculous, and he wasn't exactly excited
08:54about the idea of moving to New Zealand for a few years to shoot. Said audition saw Maron being
09:00handed a top-secret script, and being asked to read for the part of Dr. Ian Garvin.
09:05Only instead of your typical sit-down read-through, Maron ended up being thrown into a free zone,
09:10as he called it, with a bunch of other folks flying around him, and reading in parts as he
09:15attempted to imagine being on a boat on camera. Needless to say, Maron admitted to having no sense
09:20of character, and no idea what was happening. Unsurprisingly, the absolutely perplexed Maron
09:25didn't quite do enough to convince Cameron he was the man for the job.
09:29And while it would have no doubt been tough to turn down the Avatar director if he did
09:33unexpectedly offer him the chance to dive into this epic franchise, Maron was somewhat relieved
09:39when he received a box of cigars after the Terminator and Aliens filmmaker opted not to
09:44cast him.
09:45Tim Curry claims that he was too terrifying. Who framed Roger Rabbit?
09:49Tim Curry, who had terrified audiences a few years earlier as the Lord of Darkness in Ridley
09:53Scott's Legend, though hadn't yet played Pennywise in the 8 miniseries, was in the mix to play
09:58Judge Doom, though he claims that the producers ultimately found his audition too terrifying
10:02for its own good.
10:03Now, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? walks on a tonal razor's edge as it is, in trying to appeal
10:08to both adult fans of film noir, and young fans of animation. And evidently the filmmakers
10:13felt that Curry's innate creepiness was just a little bit too much.
10:17Considering how skin-crawling Christopher Lloyd's performance is though, one can only imagine
10:21what Curry must have brought to the table.
10:23Eddie Redmayne's ridiculous scary voices ruin his chances of being in Star Wars.
10:29When he found himself in the middle of an audition for the role of Kylo Ren in Star Wars Episode
10:337, The Force Awakens flick, eventual Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne told the Happy Sad Confused
10:39podcast, yep they really do get all the scoops, that he opted to dramatically alter his voice
10:44for the part.
10:45But instead of blowing away those in the room with his sinister sounding performance, this British
10:50sensation's many different embarrassing Darth Vader voices eventually resulted in casting
10:57director Nina Gold asking him, you got anything else? He did not.
11:02And it was in that moment that Redmayne likely realised his ill-advised decision to put on
11:06a ridiculous baddie voice probably just cost him one of the biggest parts out there.
11:11Aaron Paul's audition was ruined by JJ Abrams' trolling, Cloverfield. The specific role in
11:16question here has never been confirmed, but it is almost certainly either protagonist Rob or comic
11:21relief supporting character Hood.
11:23Having previously had a small part in JJ Abrams' Mission Impossible 3, the director invited Aaron
11:28Paul to audition for Cloverfield, which Abrams was a producer on. But Abrams ended up throwing
11:33Paul off his game big time with a feat of possibly inadvertent trolling. That's because while shooting
11:38Mission Impossible 3, Paul learned that Abrams had a funness for magic tricks. And when Paul
11:42mentioned this to him, the director convinced him to try and perform a card trick in front
11:46of the entire cast, including Tom Cruise. When it came time to audition for Cloverfield,
11:51though, he asked ahead of time whether Abrams would be there and was told that he wouldn't
11:55be attending. But lo and behold, JJ indeed did turn up and caused Paul to tank the whole thing.
12:01As told on Variety's Actors on Actors, he said,
12:03I walk in and JJ's there. He brings up the magic trick story and I lose my train of thought. I have
12:09three pages of a monologue that I memorized and that was my audition and he has to tell me the
12:14story about the card trick and now I'm super awkward. He's like, now get started. And I start
12:18doing this monologue and I completely lose my train of thought and I stop and I apologize to JJ and
12:23he's like, that's okay, thanks for coming in. And I'm like, see ya. And I walked out. It was awful.
12:27I think one. Aubrey Plaza went full method as the killer in Scream.
12:33With Aubrey Plaza trying to land the part of Ghostface in the popular Scream franchise,
12:38the Parks and Rec actor recalled to Liv Marx how she felt that going full method and dressing up
12:43as an actual murderer for the meeting would give her the best shot at being handed the iconic mask
12:48for one of the flicks. Only the team casting the movie actually wanted an actor you wouldn't
12:53expect to be revealed as the murderer. So Plaza sticking out like an insane sore thumb by
12:59intentionally dressing like a killer and looking terrible and frumpy for the audition in comparison
13:04with the rest of the glamorous lady she was up against on the day didn't exactly do her any
13:09favors. The role unsurprisingly went to one of the performers who didn't look like a legitimate
13:14slayer in the end and the actor would eventually class her call to go full method as a really bad idea.
13:20Freddie Prince Jr. lectured Sam Raimi about Venom for 25 minutes. Spider-Man. Hot off a slew of
13:25commercially successful genre films like I Know What You Did Last Summer and its sequel and She's
13:30All That, Freddie Prince Jr. snagged himself in audition for Spider-Man. But in a 2019 episode of
13:35his podcast Prince and the Wolf, the actor admitted that he effectively sabotaged his own shot by spending
13:39the entire meeting with director Sam Raimi talking about a character who wasn't even in the movie.
13:45That being of course Venom. He said quote,
13:47I got a meeting with Sam and I was super excited, super nervous. Went in and we sat down. It was only
13:52like three people that he was talking to and I sat down and he goes, so tell me, tell me what you
13:57love about Spider-Man. I go into this whole like universe of what my favorite parts of Spider-Man were
14:02and I foolishly bring up the alien symbiote which is Venom. When I left I literally was like you just
14:07talked about Venom instead of Spider-Man for 25 minutes you stupid asshole and I drove home so upset and
14:13angry end quote. This of course is extra excruciating considering that Sam Raimi himself would later
14:18reveal years later that he didn't have much of an interest in Venom as a character at all and only
14:23included him in Spider-Man 3 after being pressured by producers.
14:25Matthew Rhys blew his James Bond audition with a terrible joke.
14:30Returning to those times awkward comedy cost folks roles, as Matthew Rhys would tell the times,
14:35he was once asked to don a dark suit and read the script for the then incoming Casino Royale
14:41flick before Daniel Craig was eventually cast as 007. And it was during that meeting for the James
14:47Bond role in the intimidating Broccoli family's office when the American's actor was asked what
14:52he'd personally do differently with the Bond franchise. Immediately wondering whether what
14:57he'd just been asked was actually a trick question, Rhys instead refrained from giving a straight answer
15:02and joked that he'd like to give the iconic agent a limp. And silence. Rhys then decided to
15:09double down on the joke. Following up with the suggestion of eyepatch? The casting team clearly
15:14weren't impressed by this potential 007's quips on the day, and opted not to hand this nervous joker
15:20a license to kill. Michael B. Jordan blamed the vague audition script, Star Wars The Force Awakens.
15:26Michael B. Jordan already had literally dozens of roles under his belt before JJ Abrams began casting
15:32actors for The Force Awakens. With this being Star Wars, everybody not named Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford,
15:37or Carrie Fisher had to audition. In a recent interview, Jordan opened up about auditioning
15:41for Finn, and the unique problem he encountered with the process. Above all else, he struggled to
15:46connect with the part due to the secrecy of the production, which meant that he didn't actually
15:50audition with the scenes from the movie's script, but rather ambiguous placeholder sides written
15:54specifically for the auditions. He said, quote,
15:57I couldn't wrap my brain around some of the sides because, you know, when you're reading for these
16:01high-level projects, there's never really any specificity in the sides. Everything's like,
16:06super vague. Everything is in secret. Reading through, I just couldn't connect to it. I definitely
16:11bombed that one for sure. End quote. It is easy to picture Jordan playing a character as likable as
16:16Finn. Though given that his failure here made for an overnight start out of John Boyega, while Jordan
16:21himself went out to enjoy enormous success in both Creed and Black Panther, it is hard to argue with
16:26the outcome for either actor.
16:27Martin Compton was dealing with extreme jet lag before his Star Trek meeting.
16:32Frustratingly for Line of Duty's Martin Compton, he'd reveal on his Restless Natives podcast that he
16:38actually explicitly requested for some time to get over the jet lag from flying all the way over to
16:43Los Angeles from the UK before being asked to come in to read for any parts. Things tend to move quite
16:49fast when it comes to meetings stateside, and Compton likely sensed he wouldn't really be
16:53able to do his best work so soon after a long-haul flight. However, when he touched down in LA at
16:58around 8 or 9 at night, he discovered an email in his inbox telling him that he had an audition for
17:04the role of Scotty in the then-new Star Trek flick the very next day. Not only that, but the actor would
17:10also need to learn a whopping three-page monologue overnight, and he ultimately ended up heading to the
17:15wrong address the day after. A move that made him two hours late. Nightmare.
17:20Harry Hamlin dissed Steven Spielberg during a hidden camera audition, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
17:26Harry Hamlin, who appeared in hit legal drama series LA Law throughout the 80s, took part in a
17:30most unorthodox audition for director Steven Spielberg, and one which he colossally screwed up.
17:36According to Hamlin, he was brought in to audition for Indiana Jones, but encountered a
17:40deeply strange audition where Spielberg asked him to make a cake.
17:43When I got there, Steven came down. He said, Harry, I'm so sorry,
17:46but George Lucas's plane is going to be late. He's flying down from San Francisco,
17:50and it's going to be at least 45 minutes until he gets here." End quote.
17:53The filmmaker then asked him and an actress trying for Marion to bake a chocolate cake
17:57using the production's office kitchen, without instructions no less,
18:01before Spielberg exited the room and left the pair to figure it out for 40 minutes.
18:06Hamlin evidently didn't realize that this peculiar task was part of the audition itself,
18:10or that he was actually being secretly recorded by Spielberg and Lucas.
18:14And so Hamlin freely sounded off on the director in a way that he believes cost him the job.
18:18He explained, quote,
18:19During that time, because Amy Irving, who Spielberg later married, had been a good friend of mine,
18:24I was talking about how Amy was calling her friend group in LA and saying that this guy,
18:28this director guy, was stalking her in New York, and how she was kind of getting annoyed because
18:33this guy, Steven Spielberg, was showing up at the stage door every night with flowers.
18:37It never occurred to me that we were actually in the audition while we were making the cake.
18:41He went on to say, quote,
18:43At least he seems to have a sense of humor about it all. And while Hamlin never became a Harrison
18:59Ford team megastar, he has still enjoyed a fruitful TV career for the last four decades. So, not bad.
19:05Jamie Foxx got starstruck because of Tom Cruise during his Jerry Maguire audition.
19:11A few years before the pair would produce big screen magic together in Michael Mann's Collateral,
19:16Jamie Foxx came face to face with the movie legend that is Tom Cruise in a Jerry Maguire audition.
19:22And things didn't exactly go smoothly for the future Oscar winner.
19:26On top of attempting to show off to the Top Gun star by boasting about how many houses he had,
19:31Foxx soon found himself getting a little starstruck.
19:34Then, after Cruise decided to take a dramatic pause in the middle of the scene,
19:38his anxious scene partner assumed he lost where he was in the script,
19:42and foolishly tried to help him before being awkwardly told it was an intentional choice, Jamie.
19:47Simply put, Foxx never really recovered from the overwhelming feeling of meeting the big name
19:51actor for the first time, and blames his truly terrible Jerry Maguire audition for the role of
19:56Rod Tidwell on the fact he just could not keep his cool.
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