The billion dollar franchise Madonna turned down: “I wanna kill myself”
Madonna has never been known as the greatest actor in the world, even though she is an unequivocal pop icon.
She certainly knows how to perform in front of a crowd, and while it would be unfair to write off every movie she has ever appeared in (she was great in Desperately Seeking Susan and Evita), she certainly has more flops than hits.
In fact, she has five Razzie wins for ‘Worst Actress’, winning for movies such as Shanghai Surprise, an overwhelming failure which saw her star alongside her then-husband Sean Penn, and the genuinely terrible erotic thriller Body of Evidence.
Some musicians have the natural acting talent to become double threats, stepping into cinematic roles as easily as they can deliver an earth-shattering falsetto, but Madonna is much better sticking to her role as the queen of pop. The cringe-inducing erotics of Body of Evidence could never compete with her compelling album Erotica released just a year before.
While Madonna’s late 1980s and early ‘90s endeavours into the world of cinema stardom didn’t exactly have the desired effect (Roger Ebert called the singer “the queen of movies that were bad ideas right from the beginning”), with the success of Evita, she showed some newfound potential. In fact, she was offered a role in a movie that would become one of the most popular sensations of the 1990s – a blockbuster hit that would change action cinema forever.
It could’ve been Madonna starring alongside Keanu Reeves in the Wachowskis’ classic cyberpunk film The Matrix, a vision of sleek outfits and technological dystopia. Presumably, she was set to play Trinity, who was instead portrayed by Carrie-Anne Moss in her breakout role. While Madonna wasn’t the only star who was approached to play the female lead – fellow pop icon Janet Jackson was also considered –we can’t help but feel glad that Madonna turned the part down. It’s hard to imagine her as Trinity, whom Moss played to perfection.
Still, Madonna has her regrets about rejecting the offer to star in the iconic 1999 film – a zeitgeist-defining exploration of AI and rapid technological advancement that came just as people began fearing how technology might crash at the turn of the new millennium. It was a huge movie, not only speaking to the cultural landscape but changing action cinema with its innovative effects, like ‘bullet time’, which might seem a bit dated now, but back then, it blew everyone’s minds.
Talking to Jimmy Fallon, the ‘Vogue’ singer revealed, “I turned down the role in The Matrix. Can you believe that? I wanna kill myself. That’s, like, one of the best movies ever made. A teeny-tiny part of me regrets just that one moment in my life.”
Surely Madonna should focus her feelings of regret towards the God-awful movies she starred in a few years earlier; none of us needed to see the car crash that was Bloodhounds of Broadway. Maybe starring in The Matrix would’ve elevated Madonna’s acting career to more sophisticated heights (and earned her a sizable cheque), but instead she turned her attention back to singing, much to the relief of fans.
