Nitpicking the OP, part 1: it’s Ray Bolger, not Roy.
Nitpicking the OP, part 2: Ray Bolger played the scarecrow. Jack Haley is the one who took over the role of tin man from Buddy Ebsen.
Joanna Pettet turned down the Etta Place role in, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” due to her pregnancy. Good news for Katherine Ross.
It’s obviously been too long since I last saw the movie. :smack:
Did you mean Hopkins, or is there more trivia I’m missing out on?
I was skeptical of the Ellen thing, since her own show started a season before Friends, but I see several references to this online. Then again, I also see a lot of poorly written clickbait sites that confuse Friends with These Friends of Mine (the original title of Ellen), which makes even less sense.
That is by far the less interesting story from Cheers! When Nicolas Colasanto’s acting career ended abruptly, one of the actors who failed to get the replacement role was one Timothy Treadwell. Disappointed, he gave up acting and went to SE Alaska to live with the Grizzlies and was eventually mauled to death by them along with his girlfriend. Herzog made a movie about that.
Ooooooh, I thought it was Marlin Perkins!
Genevieve Bujold did a day’s work as captain of the USS Voyager, didn’t like it, was hastily replaced by Kate Mulgrew.
For “Double Indemnity’ Billy Wilder was able to get Barbara Stanwyck (not only the highest paid actress but the highest paid woman in America) by challenging her : Are you an actress or a mouse? She replied actress, I hope and took the role. Casting Walter Neff, the weak malleable heel proved more difficult. Virtually every leading man: James Cagney, Fredric March, Spencer Tracy, Gregory Peck rejected it. Finally Wilder decided to approach someone whose acting experience was happy go lucky men in light comedies: Fred MacMurray (who was also very successful financially). MacMurray rejected it saying he didn’t have the acting chops forit. But Wilder wore him down and MacMurray accepted, figuring his studio (Paramount) would protect him and reject it.
But what MacMurray didn’t count on was that MacMurray’s friend Carole Lombard had recently won a large contract with Paramount and Paramount decided to teach MacMurray a lesson. Put him in a role that people didn’t want to see him in, tje movie tanks and MacMurray can’t demand so much money. But the film proved to be a financial success and also had 7 Academy Award nominations (it was shut out of winning because Paramount wouldn’t campaign for it). MacMurray suddenly had critical success and could play heels effectively in later movies like “Caine Mutiny” and “The Apartment”.
David Lean wanted Charles Laughton to play Colonel Nicholson in “Bridge on tje River Kwai”. But Laughton was overweight and insurance companies refused to cover him for 5 months of filming in Ceylon. So Alec Guinness got the role (he and James Donald argued a lot with Lean about the film).
Burt Ward was up for the Dustin Hoffman role in “The Graduate” (according to him, anyway).
One that always gets mentioned is these threads is Will Smith turning down the role of Neo in The Matrix.
Matthew Broderick was first choice to play Walter White in Breaking Bad. I’m pretty sure that would have been over in one season.
The producers of “A Man for All Seasons” wanted a big name like Richard Burton or Larry Olivier to play Sir Thomas More but director Fred Zinneman insisted on Paul Scofield, who played him on stage in London and New York. Alec Guinnes was considered for Cardinal Wolsey (Orson Welles got it) and Peter O’Toole for Henry VIII (Robert Shaw). Writer Robert Bolt wanted John Huston for Duke of Norfolk but he refused and it went to Nigel Davenport.
James Cagney said he was approached to play Alfred P Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” but he turned it down suggesting they keep Stanley Holloway from the stage version. Pretty much every British male actor was considered for the stage as Henry Higgins before they decided on Rex Harrison. Consequently dropping Julie Andrews (a relative newcomer when she played Liza Doolittle on stage) for Audrey Hepburn (singing by Marnie Nixon) in the movie was much discussed at the time.
Cagney also said Francis Ford Coppola visited him at his farm in upstate New York to pitch a role as a retired gangster in Godfather 2. I assume it was rewritten for Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth when Cagney said he wasn’t interested in un-retiring.
When Marilyn Monroe died, filming had already begun on Something’s Got to Give starring her and Dean Martin. IIRC, she had just been fired and was to be replaced with Lee Remick, but Martin refused to do the picture with anyone other than Monroe. Marilyn’s death rendered the point moot, and the movie was eventually made under the title Move Over, Darling with Doris Day and Rock Hudson.
Jerry Van Dyke turned down the role of Gilligan in favor of My Mother The Car.
Sean Connery was offered the role of Morpheus and turned it down because he didn’t think the movie would be a success. He turned down the roles of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and John Hammond in Jurassic Park for the same reason.
Connery eventually realized he was a bad judge of how well movies were going to do. So when he was offered the lead in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen he took it. The movie was a huge flop. Connery decided to quit making movies.
Holy extramarital affair! :eek:
Mickey Rooney was approached to play Archie Bunker in an American sitcom based on the British TV series Til Death Do Us Part, but turned it down. The role went to Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie for 12 years, in All In the Family, and under its new title, Archie Bunker’s Place.
Richard Dawson auditioned for the role of Col. Robert Hogan in Hogan’s Heroes, but the producers didn’t feel he could play an American convincingly enough, so the part went to Bob Crane. However, Dawson did land the role of Lt. Peter Newkirk. I saw a MacMillan & Wife episode in which Dawson did put on an American accent, and I didn’t buy it, either.
That seems unlikely – the Phoebe character existed (under the name of Ursula) in a different show, Mad About You, some time before Friends.
It may be that one of the six characters was originally intended to be something different before the writers decided to incorporate Kudrow’s character into the show, and Ellen DeGeneres was considered for that different character. But I can’t see how she would have been considered for the Phoebe character.
Nitpick: Newkirk was a corporal in the RAF.
Fun Fact: Newkirk eventually became one of the POWs’ tailors (LeBeau was the other one). The group’s first tailor was Vladimir Minsk, played in the pilot by Leonid Kinskey (“Sasha” in Casablanca), who decided against doing the series because he found the concept offensive: “Nazis were seldom dumb and never funny.”