The Leonardo DiCaprio role Matt Damon refused to play: “Too cocky for my own good”
Even though Ben Affleck is always going to be the first actor that comes to mind when anyone thinks of Matt Damon, his career path hasn’t been entire dissimilar to Leonardo DiCaprio.
They’re only four years apart in age, and while DiCaprio started off in the business at a much younger age than Damon, they’ve evolved to share a similar stratosphere as A-listers who don’t necessarily play the Hollywood game, but still have the ability to pick and choose who they work with and what they work on.
There’s been plenty of crossover, too, with both Academy Award winners working with Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Clint Eastwood, to name just a few high-powered auteurs, and they even became household names in the same year, albeit for very different reasons.
DiCaprio was already an Oscar nominee who’d been singled out as a potential generational talent in the making, but the release of James Cameron’s Titanic catapulted him to superstardom in 1997, and the billion-dollar behemoth arrived in cinemas less than three weeks after Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting had premiered.
Damon has acknowledged that he’s remained on a slightly lower rung of the ladder since then, naming DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, and Brad Pitt as the three actors who are “offered everything before me,” but there was one part he refused to play that ended up being taken by the former, despite Damon nailing his audition.
As the producer and star, it’s part of the film’s folklore that Sharon Stone lobbied hard for DiCaprio to be cast as ‘The Kid’ in Sam Raimi’s Quick and the Dead, but Damon’s agent, Patrick Whitesell, informed The New York Times that even though his client had given the best audition out of everyone who’d read and established himself as the front-runner in the producers’ eyes, he decided he didn’t want to do it.
His reason? “Sharon Stone: great actress, but a female gunslinger? You’re not going to believe this movie.” Having made up his mind that it wasn’t in his best interests, he removed himself from consideration, and DiCaprio was cast, or was Damon recalled: “Probably too cocky for my own good.”
The Quick and the Dead may have fallen short of expectations at the box office, but it’s a firm cult favourite. Not only that, but it would have reunited Damon with his Geronimo co-star, Gene Hackman, who was already one of the biggest acting inspirations and influences he’d encountered at the time. Admittedly, it hardly strapped a rocket to DiCaprio’s back, but Damon’s 1995 wasn’t much better; his only credit that year was a non-speaking role in the writer and director Rich Wilkes’ comedy, Glory Daze.
Then again, by the end of the year, he was blowing Denzel Washington away after losing an alarming amount of weight for Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire, which was also the performance that put him on Spielberg’s radar when the filmmaker was on the hunt for Saving Private Ryan‘s title character, so it was probably the right call.
