The Christopher Nolan movie Brad Pitt didn’t want to star in: “He did read the script”
These days, there can’t be many actors who wouldn’t jump at the chance to star in a Christopher Nolan movie, with the director one of the biggest names in the industry on either side of the camera.
It’s been that way for a while, with the great and good of Hollywood falling over themselves to board the Academy Award winner’s latest production, whatever it may be. ‘Best Picture’ winner Oppenheimer boasted one of the most star-studded ensembles in recent memory, and The Odyssey is shaping up in exactly the same way.
Technically, the only actor to have ever resisted Nolan’s overtures wasn’t an actor at all. However, even after David Bowie initially declined the offer to play Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, the filmmaker convinced him, placing the ‘Thin White Duke’ in a class of his own as the only on-camera talent the auteur has ever gone back to after being turned down.
Of course, that wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t until after Batman Begins that Nolan became a brand, even if his previous features indicated his qualities as one of his generation’s fastest-rising directorial minds. It was Memento that put him on the map, earning two Academy Award nominations for its screenplay and editing and setting out Nolan’s stall for mind- and time-bending narratives.
Guy Pearce gives one of his best-ever performances as Leonard Shelby, even if the smoky boardrooms of Tinseltown have conspired to keep him out of Nolan’s reach ever since. It would have been a completely different kind of film if there was an A-lister in the lead, which could have happened after the ambitious screenplay captured Brad Pitt’s attention.
“Truthfully, he did read the script,” Nolan said of the whispers that Pitt almost headlined Memento. “He read the script, and he met with me about it when he didn’t have any reason to know who I was or anything about it. And nothing came of it.”
Instead, the actor passed on Memento, citing scheduling conflicts as the reason. Looking at the timeline, with principal photography on Nolan’s breakthrough feature commencing in September 1999, Pitt opted to make Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, which kicked off shooting less than two weeks after Memento had wrapped.
Honestly, it worked out best for everyone. Memento wouldn’t work as well if a world-famous actor were in the lead role, and Pearce was perfect for the part. Meanwhile, Snatch allowed Pitt to shed his movie star image in favour of an eccentric supporting character part, which he’d increasingly incorporate into his arsenal in the years that followed.
It would have been a markedly different experience were Pitt the one trying to unravel the mystery of his wife’s death, and not necessarily a better one.
