By It's the 20th anniversary of Joel and Ethan Cohen's rug-avenging epic The Big Lebowski, but it turns out that despite thinking that the script was "really wild and weird and funny" when he first read it, Steve Buscemi was very close to ducking the film completely.
"When I was reading the part of Donnie, I kind of didn’t get it," Buscemi told The Today Show when it brought him, Jeff Bridges and John Goodman together for a reminisce. "I felt bad for the guy. I felt sad. I thought, 'Why does Walter bully him all the time?' And as I’m reading it, I thought, 'How am I gonna tell Joel and Ethan that I don’t want to do this?' And then I got to [Donnie’s] last scene… Then I saw the relationship. I saw how much Walter really loves Donnie and how they’re like brothers, and I found it very moving."
And it's a good thing he did - his performance as Donnie really ties the film together, you know? Buscemi's not the only one who nearly passed on a golden role, either.
Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in Die Hard
Gruber was Rickman's breakout film role - he later recalled that at the time he'd "never made a film before, but I was extremely cheap", which helped him get a foot in the door - but was initially underwhelmed by the whole idea of Die Hard. "What the hell is this?" he remembered thinking as the script landed on his desk. "I'm not doing an action movie." The script, though, ended up winning him round.
Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper in Jaws
Dreyfuss wasn't that bothered about playing an oceanographer in some film about a shark by a guy who'd only made one proper feature film, but after hating his performance in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - a comedy drama about a man who really, really wants to build some houses around a lake - Dreyfuss begged Steven Spielberg for another go.
Leo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson in Titanic
Even early on in his career, Leo refused to just bodge together any old performance and pocket a few quid, which nearly led him to pass on playing the slightly tedious Jack. "His character doesn’t go through torment, and Leo previously and subsequently in his career was always looking for that dark cloud," director James Cameron told People magazine. "It became my job to convince him that it was a challenge to do what Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart did in previous generations, to stand there and be strong and hold the audience’s eye without seeming to do very much. [It was] only when I convinced him that was actually the harder thing to do that he got excited."
Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction
There were a lot of things Thurman wasn't sure about when she first got the script for Pulp Fiction, though it wasn't just the drugs or the violence or feeling "awkward and embarrassed" about that twisting scene with John Travolta: she was "worried about the gimp stuff", she told Vanity Fair in 2013. As one would be. Fortunately, "very memorable, long discussions" about the morality of the gimp stuff talked her around.
Tom Hanks as Josh Baskin in Big
Hanks nearly ditched Big for quite a tedious reason - just some scheduling commitments which were then sorted out, so everything was absolutely fine - but you really need to know that studio bosses had pencilled in Robert De Niro to step in for him. Robert De Niro! Imagine being a 12-year-old waking up in De Niro's body. Absolutely terrifying.
