The iconic role Taron Egerton abandoned during his audition: “I didn’t feel it”
There are some roles that certain actors would do literally anything for, while others turn them down, simply not feeling that spark needed to embody it to perfection.
This was the case for Taron Egerton, who many would term an idiot for turning down a role in a legendary franchise, but if you’re not feeling it, there’s no good in forcing it. The actor has appeared in some pretty popular movies over the years, from the Kingsman franchise to the award-winning biopic Rocketman, in which he played the titular music icon Elton John, but when Star Wars came knocking, he just didn’t know if he had what it took to play the part he initially auditioned for.
Surely you’d be mad to turn down the most popular movie series in the world, with the first instalment in the franchise changing cinema forever when it became a blockbuster phenomenon, marking a new era for sci-fi epics that were accessible for all. It was a monumental moment for movies-as-commodities, with an incredible amount of merchandising quickly cementing its place in pop culture. When the sequels emerged, and then eventually the prequel series and everything in between, Star Wars truly became one of the most defining franchises in the world.
Egerton auditioned for the role of Han Solo in Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, which tells the backstory of Harrison Ford’s iconic character a decade prior to the 1977 film, deciding to step back when he realised that he just couldn’t compete with a performance that had already been popularised by Ford. In the end, Alden Ehrenreich nabbed the part, much more confident in his ability to fill some massively iconic shoes.
“I felt that, I’ll be honest. I got on the Falcon, I was with Chewie, I was in the costume. I got there, I did it, I lived it,” he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “There was another round, I decided not to do it. It just felt to me like I didn’t feel ‘I’ve got to do this, this is my part’. You’re following Harrison Ford, no one ever wants to follow Harrison Ford.”
He just couldn’t feel the spark to spur him on, and was unwilling to turn in a performance less than perfect, adding rather candidly, “It’s hard, isn’t it? I feel like there’s an unspoken thing in Hollywood where it feels almost taboo to talk about the conversations you’ve had that never came to a reality. But I don’t care about that.”
Therefore, he made the wise decision to focus on other projects instead, and it’s probably for the best, for while Solo: A Star Wars Story was a box office failure (with such a massive budget, it just didn’t scrape enough to make the movie worthwhile), Egerton went on to win a Golden Globe for Rocketman shortly after, before starring in one of the most-streamed Netflix movies of all time, Carry-On. These might not have been Star Wars, but the actor certainly feels like he made the right choice.
