The beloved movie Susan Sarandon was forced to make: “I couldn’t deal with them suing me”
Susan Sarandon never set out to be movie star. She was going to college when she met and fell in love with aspiring actor Chris Sarandon. When she accompanied him to an audition one day and read a scene with him when there was no one else to do it, she caught the eye of the casting director. Shortly thereafter, she went on her own audition for the 1970 movie Joe, directed by John G Avildsen. It was an unexpected hit, and she became a star.
This sort of Cinderella story rarely happens in Hollywood. Most actors toil in obscurity for years before landing their breakthrough, and many of them never actually get a breakthrough at all. Sarandon’s talent and star power were evident from that first accidental audition, though, and she’s done nothing but follow through ever since. Following the success of Joe, she appeared in Billy Wilder’s adaptation of The Front Page and the cult classic to end all cult classics, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
For someone who landed in the spotlight almost by accident, it’s hardly surprising that, at one point in her career, Sarandon wanted to pump the brakes. It was 1987, just before she’d attained the kind of stardom that would make her a household name, and she was offered the role of Alexandra in George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick. Set in an idyllic town in New England, the film follows three single women who are unaware that they are witches and that their friendship makes them a coven. When Jack Nicholson’s character arrives in town and starts causing trouble, their powers quickly become evident.
Sarandon was living in Italy but agreed to play the part of the artsy single mother, Alex. When the director called her and told her that Cher would actually be playing the character and that he wanted her to play the lonely, timid Jane instead, Sarandon baulked. That role would require her to learn the cello, and she didn’t want to do the scenes Jane had with Nicholson’s character. But when she arrived in Los Angeles to shoot the film, she discovered that she had no option.
“They wouldn’t let me out of it, and I had to learn to play the cello,” she said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “My poor 18-month-old daughter was horrified every time the cello teacher came over. Because the noise that I was making was devastating, I couldn’t deal with them suing me, so I stayed.”
In the end, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. She became friends with everyone on set, and Cher even helped her create her character by giving her a wig and the gold dress that Jane wears in a pivotal part of the film. “That helped me figure out my character because my character didn’t even go to the end of the script when I got it,” she revealed. “So, thank you, Cher.”
Critics weren’t crazy about the film, but it ended up being a hit at the box office, earning $103 million off of a $22 million budget. It’s only become more popular in the ensuing decades. It might not have the cult credentials of Rocky Horror, but that’s an impossibly high bar.
