10 Actors Who Rightly Turned Down Iconic Roles
They passed on great characters, but thankfully their replacements made them legendary.
We’ve looked previously at actors who missed out on iconic roles in both film and television, but this time it’s slightly different. Then, there were a plethora of reasons involved. Tom Selleck couldn’t play Indiana Jones because of scheduling conflicts with Magnum, PI for example.
Elsewhere, Chris Rock was a front runner for George Constanza In Seinfeld, before one of the executives decided he’d be wrong for the part. Richard Lewis even lost out on Mork because he couldn’t do a Martian accent without sounding like he was speaking Danish.
This time though, it’s actors who were specifically offered roles or even cast in parts, before they personally turned it down. There were some on the previous two lists which fall under this category (Matt LeBlanc as Phil Dunphy in Modern Family, for example), but all ten included here with be brand new.
Casting and recasting is a part of showbiz after all, but with these ten it definitely worked out for the best. These roles are so iconic it’s difficult to imagine them being played by anyone else. Turns out though, they all almost were.
10. Leonardo DiCaprio - Patrick Bateman (American Psycho)
Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale have both established themselves as two of the best character actors of the 21st Century, either as standout supporting characters or as the stars. Despite DiCaprio’s good looks, he’s more than willing to get his hands dirty in movies like Django Unchained, The Revenant and The Departed.
However, back in the late ‘90s, DiCaprio had just become one of the biggest stars on the planet thanks to Titanic, a role which made him a major heartthrob. He was all set to take that momentum with him into American Psycho, before his entourage encouraged him to drop out.
It didn’t really do to have the world’s biggest teen dream chasing around murdering girls with chainsaws after all, did it?
After Leo left, Christian Bale stepped up and made the role his own, inhabiting the truly twisted mind of Patrick Bateman better than anyone could have. Two years later in 2002, DiCaprio starred in Gangs Of New York and began shedding his heartthrob image to take on more serious, gritty parts.
Skipping American Psycho seems to have worked out well not only for him, but for Christian Bale too.