Actors are crucial to making characters iconic. A role could be written exquisitely on paper, but get the wrong guy up saying those lines, and a project will start to look more like a Lifetime movie than a major motion picture that's sure to receive Oscar-buzz upon its release. For instance: Han Solo portrayed by anyone other than Harrison Ford would be nearly blasphemous, even if that other person were someone as brilliant an accomplished an actor as Al Pacino. Similarly, it's hard to tell if The Blind Side would have still shown up in the Academy Awards' Best Actress category if Julia Roberts had been portraying the lead character instead of Sandra Bullock.
The above examples, however, nearly happened, as did a whole bunch of other almost-castings of iconic roles in Hollywood. It must be tough as an actor to know that you turned down a role that could have been major, but it's safe to say things all worked out for the best. However, that doesn't mean we can't still gawk at what could have been. Prepare yourselves to enter an alternate universe now, with this History of Iconic Roles That Famous Actors Turned Down.
Written by Tanya Ghahremani (@tanyaghahremani)
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