10 Movie Roles Obviously Designed For Other Actors
3. Dr. Alan Grant, Jurassic Park (1993) - Harrison Ford
From the late-eighties to the mid-nineties, Harrison Ford was the biggest leading man in Hollywood. If a script had a male lead role over 45 years old, they took it to Ford first, because if he said yes, their project would get an immediate green light, a start date, and a hike on the budget.
Of course, even a workaholic can’t be in everything, and Ford has never been a workaholic, so he almost always said no. That's exactly what happened with the role of Dr. Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, a role which was not so much written for him as modelled on the character that had made him a star.
No, not Han Solo – Indiana Jones. If you check out the painted concept art Spielberg had knocked up at the pre-production stage, the guy running away from the T-Rex with the two kids is the spitting image of Ford’s rugged archaeologist. That's not a coincidence.
You can see why he turned it down. Grant is a rough-and-ready pre-history geek, a palaeontologist with a gung-ho attitude and a cool hat who spends half the movie running away from elaborate special effects: basically, everything he spent half the 1980s doing.