Charlie Sheen has recalled being passed over for the lead role in Born on the Fourth of July, calling the rejection a “betrayal.”
Helmed by William Oliver Stone, the 1989 war drama starred Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic, the decorated Marine veteran on whom the movie is based.
However, before Cruise landed the role, Sheen, 60, was originally in talks to lead the movie.
“The thing that was weird is [Stone] said, ‘You know, I want you to do Born on the Fourth.’ And we had meetings about it and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic. And then I stopped hearing from [Stone], we stopped talking about it, and I reach out to Oliver, and I’m told that he’s in Cuba,” Sheen said during Wednesday’s episode of Graham Bensinger’s In Depth interview series.
It wasn’t long before Sheen received a call from his older brother, Emilio, who broke the news. “He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right?” Sheen remembered.
“I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?’ He says, ‘Cruise is doing Born on the Fourth,’” Sheen continued. “I love that Emilio thought that I needed to be seated to get news he thought was going to make me faint. I mean, what are we doing here? It’s a movie.”
While the Two and a Half Men alum agreed that the rejection was a “big deal,” he added that it was “also the betrayal factor of it all” that hurt.
“So I was like, ‘Okay, all right.’ You know, Oliver’s been a fan of Tom’s for a long time. It’s a different movie if Tom does it than if I do it,” Sheen said.
“You can’t lose something you never had,” he noted. “I didn’t sign a contract [but] there was a handshake.”
He acknowledged that they had been “far enough down the road to feel like this was our next thing,” revealing that they had also signed a napkin.
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“My word was honored between us,” the Emmy-nominated actor said, “but it’s fine.”
Sheen said he later ran into Stone at a bar and addressed the ordeal for the first time.
He claimed that Stone told him he felt like Sheen had lost “passion” and “interest” in the movie, to which Sheen responded, “I didn’t see you. How do you know how much passion I lost or interest that evaporated if we never talked about it again?”
The Independent has contacted Stone’s representative for comment.
Nevertheless, Sheen assured there was no bad blood between him and Stone. “It wasn’t like a thing, where, you know, I’m going to talk s*** about him,” the Platoon actor said. “Because then you see the movie and you’re like, ‘Oh s***. Ok. He turned it into that.”
Praising Cruise’s acting in the movie, Sheen argued that the Mission: Impossible star should have won the Oscar for his performance.
Cruise was nominated for Best Actor at the 1990 Academy Awards for his portrayal of Kovic, but ended up losing the category to Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot.
