The Joe Pesci role almost played by Danny DeVito: “I don’t know what the fuck he wanted”
It’s easy to go, ‘Oh aye, that makes perfect sense because they’re both diminutive sorts who can be just as angry as they are funny’, but Joe Pesci and Danny DeVito haven’t exactly spent decades battling it out to secure parts as any movie or TV show’s requisite furious short guy.
For one thing, they’ve had completely different careers, with Pesci being incredibly selective about what he chooses to sign up for. He’s basically semi-retired at this point and has been for a long time, leaving behind an impressive list of credits that numbers Raging Bull, Once Upon a Time in America, Home Alone, the Lethal Weapon franchise, Casino, Goodfellas, and The Irishman.
DeVito, meanwhile, broke out in the 1970s and won both a Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy for his work on the sitcom Taxi. He’s mining that comedic vein to this day as the lecherous Frank Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Sure, they’ve got some things in common, but they’re also very different.
Ironically, an actor and comedian completely unlike either of them were once in the frame to play a role that one flirted with, and the other eventually played when Andrew Dice Clay emerged as the top choice to embody the title character in 1993’s Courtroom dramedy My Cousin Vinny.
Jonathan Lynn directed the film that won Marisa Tomei an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’. The movie eventually boasted Pesci on top form as a lawyer who’d never won a case who ends up defending his cousin and their friend from a murder charge that’s way out of his league.
The director admitted that long after he’d steered My Cousin Vinny to much acclaim and box office success, he’d “heard later Danny DeVito was attached to play Vinny and direct,” but “for some reason, that didn’t happen.” As it happens, writer and producer Dale Launer knew exactly why.
“I had a meeting with Danny,” he said to Rolling Stone. “I’m sitting there with a legal pad and a pen. He says, ‘The script just doesn’t go’. I said, ‘You want more ‘go’?’. And he laughed. That was pretty much the tone of the meeting. He ended up dropping out of the project because he thought my heart wasn’t in it. And my heart wasn’t in it because I don’t know what the fuck he wanted.”
Pesci may not have ended up in the running for any major trophies, but he did win an American Comedy Award for ‘Funniest Lead Actor in a Motion Picture’, in a performance that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves when stacked up against his finest work. DeVito is a great actor and an accomplished filmmaker, but he evidently wasn’t impressed enough with the material to commit.
