Jennifer Aniston’s secret contribution to David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’
David Fincher’s Zodiac is one of the most fascinating movies released in the 21st century. It’s a brilliantly tense, meticulous movie with some stunning performances and Fincher at the top of his game, and critics recognised this upon its release in 2007. However, despite the movie being so acclaimed, it was bafflingly ignored by the Academy, receiving not a single Oscar nomination, and it also performed middlingly at the box office.
In truth, Fincher’s haunting film was perhaps mis-sold to moviegoers because it appeared to be a serial killer movie on the surface. Yet, not too long into its runtime, it revealed itself as a newspaper drama that took its cues much more from All the President’s Men than something like The Silence of the Lambs. It was also a film about obsession and the elusiveness of truth, and those themes meant it required an incredible cast to pull it off.
Luckily, Fincher assembled a superb core trio of Jake Gyllenhaal, then fresh off Jarhead, Robert Downey Jr, then one year away from becoming the biggest movie star in the world with Iron Man, and Mark Ruffalo, then arguably best known for his charming turn in 13 Going on 30. When the director first began to think about casting these roles, though, he wasn’t exactly sure who he envisioned in the parts, until one fateful weekend he spent chatting with Jennifer Aniston of all people.
At the time, the iconic Friends star was married to Brad Pitt, who formed a close bond with Fincher after working with him on Se7en and Fight Club. So, he valued their opinion on casting for Zodiac, which was arguably shaping up to be his most personal project yet.
After all, Fincher grew up in San Francisco when the mysterious killer was terrorising the city, and had vivid memories of his father telling him the crazed killer had written to the San Francisco Chronicle threatening to shoot out the tires of a school bus and pick off the kids as they came off the vehicle. Fincher’s father, a no-nonsense journalist, was never one to sugarcoat things for his son, you see, and he still made him ride the bus.
Knowing how much the project meant to him, Aniston took his plea for casting suggestions seriously and offered two names she’d loved working with at that point. “Jake Gyllenhaal was one of them, and Mark Ruffalo was the other one,” Fincher recalled on the Zodiac DVD commentary. “She was telling me just how unbelievably talented these guys were”. Indeed, Aniston had starred with Gyllenhaal a few years earlier in the indie drama The Good Girl, and had just wrapped on the romcom Rumour Has It with Ruffalo.
The more Fincher pondered her suggestions, the more he began to think she was bang on the money about both. He had loved The Good Girl and felt Gyllenhaal was also great in Donnie Darko, and came to believe the young star was perfect for the central role of Robert Graysmith, a bookish, socially awkward, and naive political cartoonist who develops an obsession with the Zodiac killer that threatens to tear his life apart.
Aniston had also hit the nail on Dave Toschi when she mentioned Ruffalo, which Fincher would never have seen otherwise. Toschi was the famous investigator whose personal style formed the basis for both Frank Bullitt in Bullitt and Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry. Yet, his real-life persona didn’t seem to be much like Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood at all. He was intimately involved in the Zodiac case, though, so his presence would be felt throughout the movie.
“I was trying to think of an actor for Dave Toschi,” Fincher mused, noting, “There’s a real sense of warmth to him that I don’t think comes across in all the clippings that you read about Dave. It’s this bogus ‘super cop’ kind of nonsense, but there’s something about him that was so warm. I was talking to Jen about this, and she told me about her experience working with Ruffalo.”
Fincher had never met Ruffalo at that point, and had recently seen him in Michael Mann’s Collateral, where he played a fairly standard taciturn detective with slicked back hair and a chain necklace. “I thought he seemed oddly out of step in that movie,” Fincher recalled, and given what Aniston was saying, he now knew why. Ruffalo wasn’t the man to play a badass crusading cop; he was a warm, softly-spoken guy who could perfectly inhabit the real Toschi, not his exaggerated screen counterparts.
So, there you have it! Without Aniston, Fincher’s magnum opus could have looked very different, proving that sometimes a film can be immeasurably improved by someone whose name isn’t even in the credits.
