How Christopher Walken lost out on ‘Star Wars’ role to Harrison Ford
The casting process for major movies has either become a lot more streamlined or a lot more secretive over the years, because rarely does a taxing tale of whittling down prospective candidates to find the ideal star become as famous as it did throughout the 1970s, with Christopher Walken just one of many names caught up in the carousel.
Zeroing in on three films in particular – all of which were released between 1972 and 1978 – it gave off the impression that casting agents were auditioning everybody they could think of, creating a series of crossovers that would regularly find the same group of performers reading for similar parts in titles that the overwhelming majority of them never ended up appearing in.
For all intents and purposes, casting Michael Corleone in The Godfather was a nightmare. The studio wanted Warren Beatty or Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman auditioned alongside Martin Sheen, Dean Stockwell, and James Caan, Marlon Brando threatened to quit when it was offered to Burt Reynolds before the relatively unknown Al Pacino ended up making magic with the character.
Fast forward half a decade, and George Lucas was seeking his perfect Han Solo. He had no intention of reuniting with Harrison Ford following their first collaboration on American Graffiti, which led to a revolving door of prospective space smugglers that once more involved Caan, Pacino, and Reynolds, while the search also cast its eyes at Chevy Chase, Robert De Niro, Richard Dreyfuss, Nick Nolte, Kurt Russell, and many more besides, which is where Walken came in.
He acknowledged how “about 500 other actors auditioned” for the soon-to-be-iconic part, while denying the rumours that he was Lucas’ preferred candidate before he ultimately plumped for Ford. By his own admission, Walken didn’t think he “came remotely close to getting the job,” but if he had, then all of Han’s most iconic lines of dialogue would have been delivered in a very different way. Saying that, they’d have probably been rewritten to cater to Walken, seeing as he reads his lines like nobody else.
Years later, he looked back and realised he’d dodged a bullet, referring to both Star Wars and 1970’s Love Story as movies he would have been “awful” in were he to beat out the hundreds of other hopefuls and become part of the sci-fi blockbuster that changed the face of cinema forever.
Walken then found himself under consideration to potentially play Superman in Richard Donner’s 1978 comic book adaptation, but he was far from the only one. Of the names mentioned previously who flirted with either The Godfather or Star Wars – or both – Reynolds, Redford, Caan, Nolte, and Beatty were all on the extended shortlist for the ‘Man of Steel’, alongside Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul Newman, James Brolin, Kris Kristofferson, and Charles Bronson.
Hollywood might be a difficult place to break into, but once somebody gets there, it’s clear they end up being lumped into consideration for the same parts, which in the case of Star Wars, Superman, and The Godfather, drafted in a mind-blowing array of names who were already either established as fixtures of the big screen, or would end up getting there eventually.
