10 Actors Who Were Too Scared To Accept Movie Roles

6. Christina Applegate Was Scared Of Being Typecast By Legally Blonde...

Christina Applegate Anchorman
Dreamworks

Legally Blonde is the movie that made Reese Witherspoon's career, with the actress eventually becoming a household name, winning Oscars, and proving one of the most in-demand leading ladies of the last two decades.

On the other hand, Christina Applegate - while still successful - hasn't quite hit those same levels of stardom. Somewhere out there though, there's an alternate reality where she beat Witherspoon to the Legally Blonde role, a turning point that would've sent the actresses down vastly different paths.

Back at the turn of the century, Applegate was offered the chance to star in Legally Blonde before Witherspoon became involved, but she opted to pass on the project due to concerns about being typecast as a ditzy blonde:

"The script came along my way... and it was a blonde who in that first script didn't win it but ends up going to Yale, or Harvard, I don't remember... I got scared of kind of repeating myself."

With hindsight, she acknowledged that rejecting Legally Blonde was a "stupid move", while also praising Witherspoon's memorable performance.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!