10 Actors Who Thought OTHER Actors Were Better For Their Role

Viggo Mortensen received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance as Don Shirley's (Mahershala Ali) irreverent New Yorker driver Tony Lip in the Best Picture-winning Green Book.

Despite the general acclaim for Mortensen's performance, there were nevertheless those who felt his character was a little too much of an Italian-American caricature, something which Mortensen himself was incredibly wary of when the part was offered to him.

In an interview, Mortensen said:

"I had a lot of misgivings about it. The last thing I wanted to do was a caricature...I said, 'You know, there's a lot of good Italian-American actors out there, and there's many memorable Italian-American characterisations on TV and in movies, in recent years…You got a lot of people to choose from.'"

Though Mortensen originally planned to turn the part down, he eventually decided to sign on after considering how "boneheaded" he felt his own casting as Sigmund Freud was in David Cronenberg's film A Dangerous Method, and how satisfied he nevertheless was with the end result.

Despite clearly seeing himself as an unnatural fit for Tony Lip, he was ultimately happy with his decision to stick with the film:

"I trusted it, and I'm glad I did because the moment I said yes, and then met [Tony's son and the film's co-writer] Nick Vallelonga and he basically shared his family with me and all their memories and recordings and everything, I started to feel, immediately, 'Okay, yeah, it's possible. It's gonna take some work 'cause it’s a different kind of role than I've played before.'"