Typically, when an actor or actress is not chosen for a film, it’s quite simply, “We don’t want to cast you.” However, on occasion, there are extraneous circumstances involved. Here are four actors and actresses who lost out on notable roles in superhero TV series and movies for interesting reasons.
1 Richard Kiel as the Incredible Hulk. Richard Kiel is best known to audiences as the steel-toothed villain Jaws in the James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. Casting for the Hulk was down to Kiel and a then-unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ultimately, Kiel was chosen because of his great advantage in height over Schwarzenegger (over seven feet tall compared to Schwarzenegger’s six). However, after filming began, the producers decided Kiel just did not look the part. He was tall, yes, but he did not have the muscular bodybuilder form they wanted the character to have. Thus, bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno was brought in as a replacement.
2 Sean Young as Vicki Vale. Sean Young was not only cast as reporter Vicki Vale for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film, she actually was involved in preproduction right up until one week before the film began shooting. There was a horse-riding scene in the film, and Young was practicing her riding. However, she was thrown from the horse and she broke her arm, forcing her out of the film. The producers brought in Kim Basinger at the last minute and the rest is movie history. Young tried to win the role of Catwoman in the sequel by showing up at director Tim Burton’s house in a homemade Catwoman outfit, but clearly, that tactic didn’t work.
3 Dougray Scott as Wolverine. For a while there, things were looking good for Dougray Scott: he had won the coveted role of Wolverine in X-Men and he was cast as the bad guy in the Mission: Impossible sequel opposite Tom Cruise. The problem was that Tom Cruise just did not like the script of Mission: Impossible II. So right before filming was to begin in March 1999, production was delayed for two months, therefore making the filming of Mission: Impossible II overlap with the filming of X-Men. Ultimately, Scott had to drop out of his role as Wolverine. With very little time to prepare, the producers of the film had to find a replacement, so they went back to one of the early candidates for the role (from nearly ten months earlier), Hugh Jackman. Jackman later noted that, when he spoke with Scott years afterward, “I didn’t quite have the guts to say thank you; I kind of apologized to him.”
4 Benjamin Walker as the Beast. In 2010, the brash young star of the off-Broadway sensation Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson won the role of the young Hank McCoy in the 2011 film X-Men: First Class. However, after learning that Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson was going to get a run on Broadway, Walker quit the X-Men role to reprise his role in the musical. He was replaced by Nicholas Hoult. Sadly, the musical opened in October 2010 and closed on January 2, 2011. (True story, I had tickets to the January 4 showing.) Still, you have to admire a guy for sticking to his roots like that. Walker landed on his feet, though, as just a few weeks later he signed on to play the lead in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.