The 1989 movie that gaslit Robin Williams out of a role: “They said I didn’t reply soon enough”
Gaslighting may have only recently entered the lexicon, but the phrase has been around in some form or another since the 1940s. If it had caught on sooner, though, it would have been the perfect way to describe how Robin Williams missed out on an iconic role, not that it was a good thing.
He was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood in the late 1980s, and since that’s the way the business had always worked, it meant that he usually had his pick of the biggest and highest-profile parts. There was one that he desperately wanted, only for shady studio tactics to pull the rug from underneath him.
Williams was very famous and celebrated as a stand-up comedy sensation and sitcom staple, but he didn’t become a movie star until Barry Levinson’s Good Morning, Vietnam landed him on the ‘Best Actor’ shortlist at the Academy Awards following its 1987 release. That’s not revisionist history, either: he said it.
With his career progressing to the next level, the doors to playing more visible characters in more prestigious productions had officially opened, and he set his sights on one of the biggest of them all. He wasn’t the only one, but after John Lithgow sabotaged himself out of it and Tim Burton was told that John Glover wasn’t famous enough, Williams considered himself the front-runner for Batman‘s Joker.
Unfortunately for him, there was an elephant in the room with a shit-eating grin. Despite lobbying hard to be cast as the arch-enemy of Michael Keaton’s ‘Dark Knight’, Warner Bros had its sights set on Jack Nicholson. Unlike Williams, who would have jumped at the chance, he took a little more convincing.
The eventual Oscar-winning actor was under the impression that the Joker was his for the taking, and an offer had been made, only to get a phone call from the studio that crushed his dreams. “I replied, but they said I was too late,” he lamented. “They said they’d gone to Jack over the weekend because I didn’t reply soon enough.”
Of course, he didn’t believe them. Warner Bros had asked him if he wanted the gig on the Friday, telling him he had the weekend to mull it over before signing on the dotted line. Instead, he discovered that Nicholson had finalised his deal to antagonise the ‘Caped Crusader’. If that’s not gaslighting, then what is?
“I said, ‘You gave me until Monday, I replied before the deadline,'” Williams insisted, but at that moment, he realised why the executives had betrayed him. “It was just to get Jack off the pot.” It was a dick move, stringing the star along and convincing him that, come Monday, he’d be locked and loaded to don the clown paint and parade around Gotham City as hammily as humanly possible.
In reality, he was the second choice at best, and the main motivator for trying to convince him otherwise was to leverage Williams against Nicholson to ensure that Warner Bros got its number one guy.
