How Brad Pitt helped Helena Bonham Carter land ‘Fight Club’ role
The three main roles in David Fincher’s Fight Club were perfectly cast, with all three actors playing their part in turning the initially divisive jet-black satire into a classic. That being said, one of them proved a lot trickier to tie down than the others.
Brad Pitt and Edward Norton signed onto the project early on in the development process, but finding the ideal Marla Singer was a much tougher nut to crack. It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Helena Bonham Carter playing the enigmatic figure, but she was far from being the front-runner.
Janeane Garofalo claims she was handed the script and told by Fincher, “If you like it, the part is yours”. However, she suggested that Edward Norton was the reason she didn’t end up in the movie, saying the star “felt I didn’t have the chops to do it”. Norton disputed those claims in no uncertain terms, though, offering a rebuttal saying, “I’m sorry Janeane is under that impression, but if she was serious, she’s really mistaken.”
Reese Witherspoon was put forward by the studio, but Fincher didn’t think she was old enough to convincingly inhabit the character, instead casting his eyes towards Julia Louis-Dreyfus. “She had no idea who I was,” he admitted of the disastrous pitch. “I’m sitting there thinking of myself, ‘My God, you are such a fucking loser.'”
Then there’s the entire Courtney Love fiasco, with Bonham Carter emerging as the standout choice after Pitt had screened one of her sex scenes for Fight Club‘s director. “I was at Brad’s house, and he goes, ‘Look at this actress; don’t think about it, just look at this actress, and he put on the sex scene at the end of The Wings Of The Dove, when Helena’s just so unbelievably sad,” the filmmaker told Total Film. “I thought she was emotionally exquisite in that movie.”
She was hardly a newcomer at the time, but Bonham Carter was still relatively untested in Hollywood, with the screenplay proving so dicey her own family didn’t want her reading it. “I think her mother had read the script and just thought it was awful, and I think that’s partly why she was ambivalent about it,” Fincher continued. “Actually, ambivalent may be giving the material the benefit of the doubt. She may have been repulsed by it.”
Those claims were corroborated by the performer, who admitted her mother “put the script outside her bedroom because it was a pollutant”. As fate would have it, a face-to-face with Fincher convinced her that such a risky role would definitely be worth taking on, and the rest is history. If it wasn’t for Pitt screening a sex scene, then maybe Fight Club would have turned out completely differently.
