The one role Paul Newman always regretted turning down: “It was a dumb, dumb mistake”
Looking back through the annals of cinematic history and you’d be hard-pressed to find an actor more beloved than Paul Newman. Aside from a clash of egos with Steve McQueen, the actor made friends as easily as exhaling, and compounded a career on screen with being a racing car driver, a maker of delicious salad dressings and charitable endeavours.
But while all those extras add a certain flavour to his career, Newman’s real talent was being completely watchable on screen. An actor as gifted with charm as he was dazzling good looks, Newman was quick to turn audiences into putty for his hands. Across a range of roles, he grabbed his opportunities with both hands and delivered a career that will be revered for decades to come. But a few moments did pass him by.
Every actor has a role or two that got away a part they badly wanted to play and just didn’t quite land. However, the opposite is also true in some cases. You see, plenty of actors have turned down roles they had no interest in, then lived to regret it when they saw how good the film turned out or how much acclaim the star who took the part was showered with. It’s comparatively rare for an actor to publicly state they regretted saying “no” to a part, though.
Thankfully, Paul Newman never subscribed to this line of thinking. In fact, he once admitted to making a dumb mistake by turning down a role that landed the eventual star a ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award nomination.
In 1974, while editing Lenny, a biopic of comedian Lenny Bruce, and choreographing the musical Chicago, legendary stage director and dancer Bob Fosse suffered a heart attack. He had open heart surgery, and while recovering in the hospital, he and screenwriter friend Robert Alan Aurthur decided to collaborate on a film inspired by his real-life brush with death. They envisioned a semi-autobiographical musical about a driven theatre director that would have fantastical elements, and soon, All That Jazz was greenlit as a major motion picture.
Fosse knew pretty quickly who he wanted to play his fictionalised alter-ego Joe Gideon in the film: Close Encounters of the Third Kind actor Richard Dreyfuss. The star, who had just won an Oscar for The Goodbye Girl, signed up and even did a week of rehearsals. On the All That Jazz DVD commentary, though, Roy Scheider – who was eventually cast as Gideon – revealed that he counselled his old Jaws co-star one night when he revealed that he had developed cold feet about the movie.
Scheider remembered, “Rick was a friend of mine, and he came by my apartment in New York to visit the family, and he said to me, ‘I don’t think I want to do this movie.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘I don’t like Fosse, and Fosse doesn’t like me, and I just don’t feel mentally prepared to do this thing.'” Scheider encouraged Dreyfuss to tell Fosse how he was feeling, and he ultimately walked away from the role.
After Dreyfuss dropped out, every leading man worth his salt in Hollywood was approached about playing Gideon. They included James Caan, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, and Alan Alda. Arguably, the biggest star that Fosse attempted to woo, though, was Newman, but he had issues with how the Gideon character was presented in the script.
In 1981, a regretful Newman confessed to The Washington Post, “I turned down All That Jazz, which was a great mistake. I didn’t think the character was redeemable. And, of course, I didn’t take Bob Fosse into consideration. It was a dumb, dumb mistake.”
Amazingly, the actor who would perfectly embody Gideon was under everyone’s noses all along. After inadvertently convincing Dreyfuss to leave the movie, Scheider was sent the script by his agent, who also happened to be Fosse’s agent. He gushed, “It blew my mind. I told him to get me a meeting with Fosse right away.”
Two weeks later, Scheider was on set playing Gideon. Less than four months after the film was released, he was at the Oscars battling it out for ‘Best Actor’ – all while Newman looked on and rued a rare error in judgement.
