The cursed movie Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, and Val Kilmer bombed their auditions for: “I had done a huge search”
Very few actors in history have arrived on the scene as fully-formed superstars, and things may have turned out completely differently for a trio of soon-to-be A-listers had they been successful in their auditions for a movie that gained infamy and notoriety.
Almost every performer with dreams of making it to the top of the industry starts from the bottom, and it’s a cutthroat world out there when hundreds of fresh-faced thespians are all competing for the same role. Fortunately, none of the three got it, which may have hampered their short- and long-term prospects if they had been tarnished by association.
The road to David Lynch’s Dune wasn’t an easy one, and things only got rockier when the director signed on. The ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel had lingered in development hell for a decade, with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s version one of the most famous films that was never made, while Ridley Scott was attached for a spell before dropping out to focus his attention on Blade Runner.
With the benefit of hindsight, Lynch wishes he’d helmed Blade Runner instead, and it’s easy to see why. The filmmaker completely disowned Dune after the production was plagued by behind-the-scenes issues, hacked to pieces by the studio, and released to withering critical responses and dire box office.
One of the few beneficiaries was Kyle MacLachlan, who made his feature debut as Paul Atreides. The actor would become a friend and frequent collaborator of Lynch in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, which wouldn’t have happened had the number one candidate for the part not bombed their audition.
“There were a few others,” production assistant Craig Campobasso recalled of the casting call. “Val Kilmer, of course, because Val was actually the number one choice up until Kyle did his screen test. Michael Biehn did not live up to it. Kevin Costner did not.”
Casting director Jane Jenkins confirmed to Mashable that “we were going to go with Val Kilmer for Paul; I had done a huge search around the country.” Meanwhile, Sean Young revealed that one of the scene partners she ran lines with before being hired as Chani would end up as the biggest star in the business.
“I auditioned with Val Kilmer, and I auditioned with Tom Cruise in Mexico City,” she said. At the time, Costner only had a handful of credits under his belt, Kilmer hadn’t yet made his big-screen bow in Top Secret!, and Cruise only had bit-parts in Taps and Endless Love to his name when Dune began shooting in March 1983.
By the end of the decade, they were all much bigger, more well-known, and higher-paid actors than MacLachlan, which isn’t intended to be a slight. Then again, would Kilmer, Costner, or Cruise have reached that level as soon as they did had they been cast as the lead in one of blockbuster cinema’s most cursed failures?
Probably not, with Dune‘s reputation ensuring that its leading man didn’t book another gig until he reunited with Lynch on Blue Velvet two years later. In a cruel twist of irony, one of the movies MacLachlan auditioned for but didn’t get during that period was Top Gun, which turned Cruise and Kilmer into stars.
