10 More Actors Who SAVED Their Careers By Turning Down Movie Roles

Many, many actors were in talks to portray Hal Jordan in 2011's Green Lantern movie, and one of Warner Bros.' top choices for the part was Mad Men's Jon Hamm.

Hamm confirmed last year that he walked away from the project, saying, "That was one I definitely didn't want to do," and as we all know, it eventually went to Ryan Reynolds.

But there's no way to not view this as a massive bullet dodged for Hamm, who given the enormously demanding nature of a superhero movie shoot would've presumably held up production on Mad Men, which was several seasons into its run when Green Lantern was being shot.

It's impossible to predict the knock-on effect this could've had on the show and Hamm's eventual, long overdue Best Actor Emmy win for it in 2015, but Green Lantern flopping would've been decidedly more harmful to his career than it was for Ryan Reynolds.

Reynolds at least had his Deadpool passion project in his back pocket, and Green Lantern's failure ultimately just gave him a ton of self-deprecating joke fodder for those films.

It's tough to picture Hamm's career having quite the same resilience post-Green Lantern, and Reynolds also met his future wife Blake Lively while shooting it, so it seems like everything basically worked out for the best.