When ‘The Duke’ says no: Every iconic role John Wayne turned down
As one of the most iconic stars in cinema history and one of the biggest names in the business at the peak of his powers, any production worth its salt would have bent over backwards to recruit John Wayne for the ensemble.
However, ‘The Duke’ had a persona to maintain, and he wasn’t one for venturing too far outside of his comfort zone. Wayne had a very strict code that heavily influenced his decision-making, and as a result he turned down a number of iconic roles in classic projects because they didn’t fit the criteria for what audiences he believed wanted to see him do.
Comedy was hardly something closely associated to the stoic face of the Western, which robbed audiences of the opportunity to see Wayne take part in two of the greatest ever. As much as he admired the pitch for Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles, ‘The Duke’ simply couldn’t get on board with the risqué humour when he was approached to potentially play the Waco kid.
Along similar lines, he didn’t even give Stanley Kubrick the time of day when he was floated as the ideal casting for Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. It would have been quite the sight if it had been John Ford’s most famous collaborator hooting and hollering as he rode an atomic bomb to his own doom.
Later down the line, as the on-screen definition of Americana, Wayne couldn’t condone the perceived “un-American” tendencies of the seminal High Noon, with screenwriter Carl Foreman ultimately being blacklisted for his suspected Communist sympathies. Gary Cooper ended up winning the ‘Best Actor’ prize at the Academy Awards for his turn as Will Kane, but that was far from the only Oscar-winning role ‘The Duke’ rejected.
Broderick Crawford won the exact same gong as Cooper for playing Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, and Wayne turned it down for very similar reasons after determining the screenplay to be unpatriotic. He also reportedly knocked back the chance to headline Patton, which yet again ended up as a ‘Best Actor’-winning part after George C. Scott was named the victor, even if he refused to accept his award.
His morals once again came to the fore when he was so horrified by the presence of adultery in the script that Wayne was left with no other choice but to knock back The Dirty Dozen, which ended up giving Lee Marvin the ample opportunity to display his own signature style of grizzled badassery.
There was already tension between Wayne and Clint Eastwood after they’d adopted different stances on and approaches to the Western, leaving ‘The Duke’ tinged with regret in the long run after he conceded that turning down the lead role in Dirty Harry was a mistake. That only covers the ‘what ifs’ of stone-cold classics, too, and there are many more movies Wayne rejected that didn’t end up as all-time greats.
However, the chief take-home is that Wayne was certainly very choosey, and quite often it wasn’t always cinematic reasons that ruled his decision-making.
The iconic roles John Wayne turned down:
- Waco Kid (Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks, 1974)
- Slim Pickens (Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
- Will Kane (High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
- Willie Stark (All the King’s Men, Robert Rossen, 1949)
- George S. Patton (Patton, Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970)
- John Reisman (The Dirty Dozen, Robert Aldrich, 1967)
- Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry, Don Siegel, 1971)