Cinema history is brimming with tales of iconic roles that nearly went to different actors. Will Smith famously turned down the role of Neo in The Matrix. Tom Selleck was initially cast as Indiana Jones. And, of course, there’s the long list of actors who vied to play James Bond. These moments of “what could have been” spark endless fascination and thought experiments. One lesser-known instance involves the enigmatic John Malkovich, the actor famously associated with a magical portal into his own head.
In terms of roles he actually played, Malkovich is most famous for The Killing Fields, Of Mice and Men, and Con Air, as well as playing a highly fictionalised version of himself in Spike Jonze’s surreal comedy. As for his near-misses, perhaps the most intriguing is the time he very nearly landed the lead character in one of the greatest Westerns of the last four decades – 1992’s Unforgiven.
The script for Unforgiven was originally optioned by Francis Ford Coppola, but the Godfather director couldn’t raise enough money to get it made. It eventually fell into the hands of Clint Eastwood, who not only directed the piece but starred in it too. He played William Munny, an ageing gunslinger called out of retirement with the promise of a hefty payday. The finished product garnered near-universal acclaim, nabbing Eastwood Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards, but if Coppola had gotten his way, things would have looked very different.
According to Malkovich, he was initially asked to play Munny. He described the offer as “not very serious” and was actually quite glad to have not taken the part. “I would have been a total, total failure,” he said. “Total! Who would’ve wanted to see that? I wouldn’t! I would’ve just been acting-schmacting.”
Apparently, Coppola was sent the script for Unforgiven “in the early 80s”, so it’s hard to picture what he would have seen Malkovich in. Places in the Heart, his big breakthrough, wouldn’t premiere until 1984. He’d been in a couple of TV movies but nothing that would suggest he was capable of leading a dark, vengeful western. Maybe he might have been up to it in 1992, having starred in acclaimed dramas Empire of the Sun and Dangerous Liasons, but he still didn’t fit the bill of what Munny would eventually become. Malkovich is over 20 years younger than Eastwood, so it’s hard to see how he would fit the mould of a grizzled old cowboy in quite the same way.
Part of what makes Unforgiven so great is that it stars someone like Eastwood. The movie is a rabid deconstruction of how the Old West had typically been portrayed on-screen. Gone were the ‘black hats’ and the ‘white hats’, and in were morally ambiguous grifters just trying to stay alive under the harsh desert sun. Eastwood, who for so many years had come to represent that era of Westerns, was the perfect instrument to demonstrate these changes.
John Malkovich might not have taken Clint Eastwood’s job, but he did work alongside him one year after Unforgiven’s release. The two were paired up for In the Line of Fire, a political thriller by Wolfgang Petersen. Malkovich plays a man trying to assassinate the President of the United States, while Eastwood is the CIA agent out to stop him.