10 Excuses Actors Used For Blowing Major Movie Auditions
3. Freddie Prinze Jr. Lectured Sam Raimi About Venom For 25 Minutes - Spider-Man
The Role
Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man aka Peter Parker, as Sam Raimi eventually chose to be played by Tobey Maguire, whose turn as Spidey remains one of the superhero genre's best to this very day.
The Audition
Hot off a slew of commercially successful genre films like I Know What You Did Last Summer (and its sequel) and She's All That, Freddie Prinze Jr. snagged himself an audition for Spider-Man.
But in a 2019 episode of his podcast "Prinze and the Wolf," the actor admitted that he effectively sabotaged his own shot by spending the entire meeting with director Raimi talking about a character who wasn't even in the movie - Venom. He said:
"I got a meeting with Sam [Raimi], and I was super excited, super nervous... Went in and we sat down - it was only like three people that he was talking to - and I sat down and he goes 'So, tell me, tell me why you love Spider-Man?' I go into this whole like universe of what my favorite parts of Spider-Man were, and I foolishly bring up the alien symbiote, which is Venom, right... When I left I literally was like 'You just talked about Venom instead of Spider-Man for 25 minutes you stupid a**hole,' and I drove home so upset and angry."
It's extra excruciating considering that Raimi would reveal years later that he didn't have much interest in Venom as a character, and only included him in Spider-Man 3 after being pressured by producer Avi Arad. Oof.