10 HUGE Movie Roles Actors Were Too Scared To Take On

This one spooked a lot of potential stars, so no shade to veteran actor Jeremy Irons in his hard choice. As hard as it is to imagine the former Brideshead Revisited star playing cinema’s most charismatic cannibal, the British thespian was offered the part before the filmmakers reached out to Anthony Hopkins. Ironically given his later roles as Simon Gruber in Die Hard With a Vengeance and Scar in The Lion King, Irons turned it down because he’d recently played a villain and didn’t want to be typecast as a bad guy.

It seems that ship well and truly sailed for him in the coming years, as he even went on to play a more morally repugnant role in the form of Nabokov’s monstrous (and pretentious) predator Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne’s over-baked adaptation of Lolita. Unfortunately for Irons, this later foray into literary-adaptation-darkness didn’t pay off, and the film was widely derided.

Meanwhile our beloved Hannibal the Cannibal went onto to appear in numerous sequels and an acclaimed tv show spin off, reigniting Hopkins’ career and furnishing his mantelpiece with a Best Actor statuette.