50 Celebrities Who Turned Down Major Movie Roles

Hathaway turned down Katherine Heigl’s part of Alison Scott in Knocked Up, telling Allure it was because of the movie’s explicit birth scene. "My issue with it was that having not experienced motherhood myself, I didn't know how I was gonna feel on the other side about giving birth,” she said.

Del Toro was in talks to play the iconic villain Khan in the 2013 Star Trek sequel, but the star walked away from negotiations after he and the production weren’t able to agree on the pay, Vulture reported. The buzzy part ended up in the lap of Benedict Cumberbatch instead.

Director Bill Condon wanted Ms. Knowles-Carter for the live-action remake of the Disney classic, but not to play Belle, as one might expect. “I tried to get her into Beauty and the Beast, but it wasn’t a big enough part,” he told Yahoo! Entertainment. “She would have been a good feather duster.” Mon Dieu! It’s no surprise that she turned down the small role of Plumette, which went to Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Hunnam famously pulled out of the much-hyped Fifty Shades adaptation, with the part eventually going to Jamie Dornan. Scheduling conflicts between the movie, his show Sons of Anarchy, and the Guillermo del Toro film Crimson Peak became too much to handle, and Hunnam called Fifty Shades director Sam Taylor-Johnson with the bad news. “We both cried our eyes out on the phone for 20 minutes,” he told V Man. “There was a lot of personal stuff going on in my life that left me on real emotional shaky ground and mentally weak. I just got myself so f--king overwhelmed, and I was sort of having panic attacks about the whole thing.”

The 12 Years a Slave star appeared to decline a hefty paycheck to play the villainous role of C in the 2015 James Bond entry, Spectre. Emails from the Sony hack indicated that Sherlock’s Andrew Scott snapped up the role for a million dollars less.

Applegate admitted that she received the script for Legally Blonde just after finishing her show Married… With Children, and she was worried Elle Woods was too similar of a role. “I got scared of kind of repeating myself,” she told Entertainment Tonight, adding, “What a stupid move that was, right?”

Blunt came very close to starring as one of the Avengers when she was cast in Iron Man 2 for Black Widow’s first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead, scheduling issues with the movie Gulliver’s Travels led to her dropping out. “It was one of things that was conflicting,” Blunt told MTV News. “So it’s a shame the two of them couldn’t work together. It just got complicated, so I think I had to pull out for my own sanity more than anything.”

Scream Queens star Emma Roberts was set to star as one of the main gals in Spring Breakers alongside Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens. But she pulled out of the film, with director Harmony Korine chalking it up to “creative differences.” He told the New York Post, “I make a specific type of film, and it goes hard. It’s not always for everyone.” Pretty Little Liars star Ashley Benson replaced Roberts in the indie hit.

When it was announced that Paul Feig would be directing an all-female version of Ghostbusters, the internet was flooded with articles dreaming up the perfect cast. Even original star Bill Murray voiced his picks, a list that included Stone. Feig apparently agreed, as Stone later revealed she’d turned down a role in the movie after starring in The Amazing Spider-Man films. “The script was really funny,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “It just didn’t feel like the right time for me. A franchise is a big commitment—it’s a whole thing. I think maybe I need a minute before I dive back into that water.” Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon ended up as the flick’s leading ladies instead.

A different Emma was originally reported to star in the Oscar-nominated musical La La Land, but Watson was unable to take on the role due to her commitment to Beauty and the Beast. “I knew I had horse training, I knew I had dancing, I knew I had three months of singing ahead of me, and I knew I had to be in London to really do that,” she said in a SiriusXM Town Hall interview. “And this wasn’t a movie I could just kind of parachute into. I knew I had to do the work, and I had to be where I had to be. So scheduling conflict-wise, it just didn’t work out.”

After confessing to Howard Stern in 2015 that she declined a part in Boogie Nights, Paltrow attempted to evade discussion of passing on the iconic role of Rose in Titanic. "My mother will kill me that I'm talking about turning down movie roles," Paltrow said. "She says it's not ladylike." She added that she “couldn’t change the past.”

Jackman told Variety that when the search was on for a new James Bond to follow Pierce Brosnan in Casino Royale, a call came asking if he’d be interested. He wasn’t. “I just felt at the time that the scripts had become so unbelievable and crazy, and I felt like they needed to become grittier and real,” he said. “And the response was: ‘Oh, you don’t get a say. You just have to sign on.’ I was also worried that between Bond and X-Men, I’d never have time to do different things.”

After Tom Hardy dropped out of Suicide Squad owing to a packed schedule, Warner Bros. reportedly sought out Gyllenhaal for the role of Rick Flag. Alas, he declined the part that eventually found its way to Joel Kinnaman. This happened just a year after Gyllenhaal dropped out of Into the Woods because of a scheduling conflict with Nightcrawler. He was to play Rapunzel’s Prince, which went to Billy Magnussen.

The rapper played the small role of Edwin in 2001’s original The Fast and the Furious, and the sequel’s director John Singleton offered him a nice pay day to return. “Ja got too big for himself. He turned it down. He turned down a half a million dollars,” Singleton told Grantland. “He was acting like he was too big to be in the sequel. He wouldn’t return calls. I went to the studio to go see him — that’s just my mantra, I deal with a lot of music people. He was kinda playing me to the side and I was like, ‘What? What is this s--t?’ This was all initiated by me. I then made a call. I called Ludacris.” Ludacris, of course, became a key part of the massive franchise, starring in five films so far.

The Oscar-winning American Idol alum admitted in her autobiography, I Got This: How I Changed My Ways and Lost What Weighed Me Down, that she was moved by the Precious script, but “wanted to try a role that had nothing to do whatsoever with [her] weight.” She later backtracked that comment and told the Huffington Post, “I just felt the character was doing things, at least in my script that I got, that were places I did not want to go and not where I needed to go.” The film’s title role instead turned Gabourey Sidibe into an Oscar nominee and household name.

Director Quentin Tarantino told Entertainment Weekly he met with Lawrence to discuss starring in his movie, The Hateful Eight, but it was to no avail. “She was just doing me a courtesy to see me, I think,” he said. “She was doing Joy. She had to do all this publicity on the Hunger Games movies. There was just no f—ing way in the world that she was available.” Jennifer Jason Leigh, 28 years her senior, took the part instead and landed her first Oscar nod.

In a 2015 interview with New York’s Power 105.1 radio station, Hart revealed he turned down the part of closeted rapper Alpa Chino in Tropic Thunder because he didn’t want to play a gay character. “The dude, he was doing a lot of stuff in the draft that I read," Hart said. "It was real flagrant… I was like, 'I can't do this.'” He then went on to say he didn’t see himself ever taking on a gay role: “I can't. Not because I have any ill will or disrespect. It's because I don't think I'm really going to dive into that role 100 percent because of insecurities about myself trying to play that part.”

Deadline reported in 2011 that Leonardo DiCaprio had “the inside track” to play Alan Turing in what would become The Imitation Game, but a year later Variety said he was “no longer… eyeing the lead.” Benedict Cumberbatch eventually filled the mathematician’s shoes and garnered an Oscar nod for his work. An in-demand leading man, DiCaprio has also turned down roles in Boogie Nights and Steve Jobs.

In 2009, it was widely reported that Lindsay Lohan had passed on the role of Jade the stripper in the original The Hangover, a part that ended up in Heather Graham’s hands. Years later, director Todd Phillips refuted this, telling the Hollywood Reporter, “Honestly, it felt like she ended up being too young for what we were talking about. People love to attack her for everything, like: ‘Ha, she didn't see how great The Hangover was going to be. She turned it down.’ She didn't turn it down. She loved the script, actually. It really was an age thing.”

Wahlberg reportedly told Premiere magazine that he read the script for the gay romance Brokeback Mountain and was “a little creeped out.” "It was very graphic, descriptive," he said. "I told [director] Ang Lee, 'I like you, you're a talented guy, if you want to talk about it more...' Thankfully he didn't." The resulting film starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, both of whom received Oscar nominations.