The iconic horror movie Jack Nicholson begged to be cast in: “You’re not going to consider me?”
Thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Jack Nicholson has starred in one of the greatest and most iconic horror movies ever made, but if he’d gotten his way, he’d have done it for the first time a decade earlier.
It takes a brave filmmaker to turn down a star of Nicholson’s magnitude when he begged for a part, and it takes an even braver filmmaker to turn down the early 1970s version of Nicholson when he’s begging for a part, with the actor in the midst of one of the most acclaimed runs any performer has ever been on.
Between 1969 and 1975, he appeared in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among others, winning an Academy Award from five nominations and two Golden Globes from six nods from those films alone.
To put it lightly, he was the best in the business, bar none. Sandwiched right in the middle of that seminal run, the most-nominated male actor in Oscars history lobbied for a part in a picture that would become a box office-busting, awards season-bothering, and altogether seminal entry into the horror genre, only to be turned down.
Nicholson wasn’t used to rejection, especially not when his career was flying higher than ever before, but William Friedkin had his reasons for denying him the role of Father Karras in The Exorcist, and it had everything to do with suspension of disbelief. Not to be deterred, though, he even tried to call in a favour from his The King of Marvin Gardens co-star, Ellen Burstyn.
“There were many actors who wanted to play that part,” Friedkin recalled. “I remember Jack Nicholson coming to see me in a restaurant where I was having lunch with Ellen Burstyn after I’d cast her. And he had worked with her. And he said, ‘Come on, man, you’re not going to consider me for this?'”
Ambushing the director when he was talking shop with The Exorcist‘s recently cast leading lady was a bold move, but this is Jack Nicholson we’re talking about, so he could get away with it. And yet, because he was Jack Nicholson, Friedkin explained why that was the major reason he didn’t have a hope in hell.
“I said, ‘Jack, if I show you in a priest collar, the whole audience is going to go up,'” the French Connection Oscar winner noted. “You’re not going to be accepted in a priest collar.” He had a point, and you can understand why he didn’t think viewers would buy Hollywood’s most famous womaniser and hell-raiser as a man of the cloth, especially in a heightened genre film like The Exorcist.
It was a firm no, and with Nicholson resigning himself to missing out, Jason Miller got the nod instead, starring opposite Burstyn, Linda Blair, and Max von Sydow in the first horror flick to be nominated for ‘Best Picture’, the highest-grossing horror ever released in cinemas, and one of the most legendary ever made.
