The actor who spent eight months negotiating for ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and didn’t get the part
The opportunity to play the lead role in a Stanley Kubrick movie wasn’t something that came around all too often, but one actor wasn’t going to blindly commit to Full Metal Jacket based solely on the director’s reputation.
What a reputation it was, though, with Kubrick responsible for several cinematic masterpieces, his name synonymous with silver screen greatness. The opportunity was right there to join Kirk Douglas, Jack Nicholson, James Mason, Sterling Hayden, and Malcolm McDowell as leading men, but it wasn’t taken.
There was a very lengthy and drawn-out negotiating process, which ended up with neither party getting what they wanted. Although he was a known commodity and a recognisable name at the time, Anthony Michael Hall was nonetheless staring the most testing period of his own career square in the face.
The actor had starred in National Lampoon’s Vacation, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science consecutively in the space of two years, but he couldn’t be a teen movie guy forever. Kubrick wanted him to play Joker, but the exhaustive discussions between Hall and the filmmaker bore no fruit.
“I was offered the film in a conversation with Stanley Kubrick, then I had an eight-month negotiation with him,” Hall explained to UGO. “We just couldn’t reach an agreement on a couple different levels, which were financial. It was a difficult decision, because in that eight-month period, I read everything I could about the guy, and I was really fascinated by him. I wanted to be a part of that film, but it didn’t work out. But all sorts of stories circulated, like I got on set and I was fired, or I was pissed at him for shooting too long. It’s all not true.”
Hall was still only a teenager when cameras started rolling on Full Metal Jacket in August 1985, whereas Matthew Modine had recently turned 26. Perhaps it was the exuberance of youth that caused the ‘Brat Pack’ alumni to stand his ground when dealing with an industry heavyweight like Kubrick, but he hasn’t gone quite as far to rue it as the one that got away.
“I knew that I’d be working for a year on that movie. In fact, I happened to run into Matthew Modine a year and a half later and I asked him, ‘How long did you guys shoot?’. And he was like, ’54 weeks,'” Hall said. “We couldn’t come to an agreement on the deal and that’s ultimately why I walked away. If I have anything close to a regret in my career, it would be not doing that movie.”
It was a ballsy move to walk away from a Kubrick film because the money and the schedule weren’t accommodating enough, but that’s the type of mindset required to make it in Hollywood.
