This is a fictional piece, but it’s based on personal experience. Vin Diesel has a short film called Multi-Facial about a budding actor auditioning for multiple roles. It’s not a bad little piece.
Three people who auditioned but didn’t make the final cut for the first season of SNL: Bill Murray, Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal. Kaufman, though brilliant, didn’t have a huge amount of range and was ultimately better suited as a frequent featured player. Crystal, whose negotiations with the show went on until just before the first show aired, really seemed to be part of an earlier generation’s traditions. Murray’s pock-marked face was kind of a hard sell, and he didn’t really gel as a cast member until a couple months into his first season a year later. They all survived.
Have her look at George Clooney’s IMDB page. That ought to cheer her right up. Besides all the failed TV shows (including a series set in a Chicago hospital called E/R) there’s this in the Trivia section:
And this:
Even after being a star, he couldn’t get some breaks:
Here are a couple of nice quotes:
(an interesting tidbit I’d never heard before, his salary as an actor in Good Night And Good Luck was $1.00!)
When I was in college, a friend of mine who was also an aspiring writer gave me a few of his short stories. I worked in a book store, and had a few indirect contacts, through my boss, with a few publishers’ reps. My friend asked me to do him a favor and take a look and tell him what I thought, and pass it on to a couple of the publishers’ reps if possible.
I read the stories, I gave them to my boss to read them, and we both agreed: some potential, but really not ready to be published yet. Which is what I reported back to my friend, David Sedaris.
A still unknown Robert DeNiro auditioned for the original Godfather as Sonny Corleone. He was rejected for being too scary “too chilling” Coppola said, and James Caan got the part. When it was time to do the sequel and they needed someone to play the young Vito, Coppola remembered that intense, scary guy that had auditioned for Sonny.
Harrison Ford got turned down quite a bit before making it big. After appearing in films and television he had to support himself by being a carpenter. He appeared in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round as a bellhop in 1968. He didn’t American Graffiti till '73.
All actors get rejected. It is something they just have to cope with if they want to be an actor.
A friend of mine was a first generation America with his parents born in the Philippians. He was constantly told he was ‘too Asian’. Finally once he was auditioning for the role in Miss Saigon. He was told he ‘wasn’t Asian enough’.
David Niven’s classic life story (The Moon’s A Balloon) is, until the last third or so of the book (? His books kind of run together in my mind ?), pretty much the story of failure after failure. Since most of his early career made of fail seems to have been due to his (to hear him tell it) outrageous ineptitude, I don’t know if it would hearten a young actor or not.
Regarding Sideways - Christ, am I glad they went with Thomas Haden Church for that role. Going with Clooney would have turned the whole thing into a movie about a suave ladies’ man and his neurotic sidekick, and taken the focus off of Giamatti’s character; instead, with Church in the role, it was about two guys who were equally neurotic but just in different ways. One of them was addicted to alcohol, the other was addicted to the conquest of women. I love Haden Church’s character Jack because he reminds me so much of my own dad; I’ve seen that movie many times and each time I really feel like I know that character. And it works perfectly because it’s an unknown and not a big-name star like Clooney.
I’ve read the book and I think that film is one of the closest and best-executed book-to-film adaptation.
Similarly, Meet the Parents was originally going to star Jim Carrey in Ben Stiller’s role. But this would have been totally lame; Stiller plays the “shlub” so much better than Carey could, despite the latter’s acting ability, and Carey generally comes off as too likeable. Stiller’s “Greg Focker” was just not that likeable; he was a real weaselly jerk, with no confidence or spine, poor posture, phony kinetics, and a really nervous style of delivery. No way could Jim Carrey have pulled off that role.
<slight hijack>
(title of book added to quote for clarity)
Really? What did you think of the part of the book where
Maya slept with Raymond because Jack paid her to do so?
Mr. S and I were both disgusted by that. We didn’t think that character would ever, ever do such a thing. (Tessa/Stephanie, though . . . what a whore.) Otherwise, we enjoyed both the book and the movie. Agree about Thomas Haden Church in the role. Clooney would have ruined it.
</sj>
When James Mason was an architecture student at Cambridge in the late 1920s, he tried out for the theatre group. The upperclassman in charge rejected him b/c he was not committed to acting. Mason left in a huff.
The upperclassman was Alistair Cooke.
Clark Gable was turned down by Warner Bros b/c “his ears are too big”.
In 1986 Phil Hartman tried out for announcer – not host, announcer – on the new Hollywood Squares. He was turned down. This made him available when Saturday Night Live held a casting call a few weeks later. Hartman: “I sometimes wonder where’d I be if I’d gotten that announcing job…”
Billy Crystal ended up on SNL in 84, he was famous for his Fernando Lamas skits.
Somewhat similarly, I had a short story published in a literary anthology back in the early-to-mid 1980s. I got a call from a friend who wanted to arrange a meeting between me and a filmmaker he knew–seems the filmmaker had picked up a copy of the anthology, read my story, and wanted to make a movie out of it. I went to the meeting, more out of curiosity than anything else, but it would be good to see my friend again. The filmmaker turned out to be a man with a strange name I had never heard of. I wasn’t impressed with his plans to film my story–if indeed, he really was a filmmaker, which I doubted–so I didn’t grant him permission to film my story.
That was how I turned down Atom Egoyan…
I’d smack you for that but I’m sure you’ve beat yourself up over that plenty already.
Many, many times. 
Eric Stoltz was the original Marty McFly, and they even began filming (what I wouldn’t give to see that footage). It just wasn’t working though (according to the DVD commentary, “He just wasn’t getting the kind of humor we were going for”), so they got Michael J. Fox, even though he was doing “Family Ties” at the same time.
Star Trek Voyager had a different actress for a few weeks of taping but she was fired and replaced by Kate Mulgrew. This article mentions she quit rather than got fired.
I’ve seen DVDs that included the actual audition/screen-test footage of well-known actors who weren’t cast - and of course I can’t think of a single example.
As to actors who were let go after filming had started, Stuart Townsend was replaced by Viggo Mortensen in the “Lord of the Rings” movies. Since Mortensen is a full 14 years older than Townsend, it seems to be an honest case of the filmmakers deciding to go with a different type rather than a reflection on Townsend’s ability.
I don’t know if this story is apocryphal, but I thought I heard Ford once say on an interview that after he’d been doing carpentry on the side for a while he went on an audition for an acting part playing a carpenter and was rejected because his carpenter movements weren’t authentic enough to please the director, even though they’d been plenty authentic enough to support him as a carpenter.
Vin Diesel has often been coy about his ethnicity, but it’s pretty widely known he’s mostly black and Italian.
And yet, he’s regularly been turned down for Italian roles because he looked too black, and he’s also been turned down regularly for black roles, because he didn’t look quite black enough.
Ron Howard, after doing the Andy Griffith Show, spent years trying out for roles and got nuthin’ because he had been type-cast after that television show.
In an interview I read, he said he was so depressed at not finding work that he and a friend came up with the idea to do a porn called, “Opie Gets Laid”.
They were actually working on the porn film idea when he got the script, and offer, for a role in American Graffiti.