No thanks for your time: the worst movie auditions from A-list stars

Every actor has a bad audition story, a recollection of how they managed to mangle their one big chance at stardom. These stories are so ubiquitous that, in La La Land, Emma Stone’s character gets to act one out for us. And the most effective way that Moonlight’s Mahershala Ali has thought to beat La La Land at the Oscars is to appear on talkshows and discuss the time he screwed up a Game of Thrones audition by sitting on the wrong type of chair.

At least a bad audition is a private affair, which means that the public at large will never get to see just how violently you buggered up your shot at fame. Or at least, they were private affairs – until the invention of YouTube. Let’s go digging.

Chris Klein, Mamma Mia

We’ll begin with the most notorious of bad auditions. The casting of Chris Klein in Mamma Mia wouldn’t have ruined the film – it did a pretty good job of ruining itself – but it certainly would have changed the story somewhat. In his version, clearly, the character who’d go on to be played by Dominic Cooper would be a slimy, over-confident serial killer with a genuinely chilling Mandy Moore fixation. Which, to be fair, does actually sound better.

Brad Pitt, Backdraft

A universe exists where Brad Pitt played Brian McCaffrey in Ron Howard’s Backdraft. And in that universe, Brian McCaffrey is a fully checked-out space cowboy whose method of delivery involves saying a number of words he doesn’t understand in a manner dictated by a tiny, invisible goblin whispering on his shoulder. In this version of Backdraft, everything burns down forever and Brian McCaffrey stands in the middle of it all, blinking.

Scarlett Johansson, Jumanji

Scarlett Johansson is one of our finest actors. However, this was not always the case. Auditioning for Kirsten Dunst’s character in Jumanji, Johansson struck upon a weirdly Charlie Brownish cadence and mined it for everything it was worth. “I’ve got sixty-seven dollars and eight cents,” she says in a way that makes you think she’s just missed another kick of the football. If she’d gotten the part, Jumanji would have included a scene of her slowly trudging along a street accompanied by Christmas Time Is Here, pursued by a lion.

Matthew Fox, Lost

Matthew Fox was a great Jack. He had exactly the right level of empty-headed neediness to play Lost’s ostensible protagonist. However, he also auditioned for the role of the slick conman Sawyer. And he auditioned poorly. Infinitely less laconic than Josh Holloway, Fox’s Sawyer was a wobbly-headed ball of misplaced intensity and bulgy neck veins who was singularly impossible to love. In fact, Fox would later put all these traits to work as the serial killer in 2012’s Alex Cross, which you didn’t see because life is short and time is precious.

Julia Roberts, Seven Minutes in Heaven

Even though it stars Jennifer Connelly in one of her first roles, Seven Minutes in Heaven is a bad film. Perhaps the reason Julia Roberts didn’t get Connelly’s part is because she didn’t realize this. Her audition is full of slow-burning resentment and overt sarcasm, when in fact everyone in the end product looks distracted and bored, as if they’re reading their lines from cue cards placed slightly too far away. Julia Roberts didn’t get this part because she tried too hard, which is to say that she tried.

Meryl Streep, King Kong

And finally, Meryl. Although no filmed record of this audition exists, it’s a story she’s told before. It is the mid-1970s. Streep goes for Jessica Lange’s role in King Kong. The audition is being held in the offices of the tastelessly gaudy producer Dino De Laurentiis. She enters the room. De Laurentiis immediately says, in Italian: “She’s too ugly.” Streep replies in Italian, to let him know that she could understand him. The moral is that only a genuine moron would ever mess with Meryl Streep.