“Maybe next time”: the one role Tommy Lee Jones always regretted not playing
Depending on what type of movies you like, you will know Tommy Lee Jones primarily as the guy from Men in Black or the sheriff from No Country for Old Men who gives one of the most enigmatic closing monologues of 21st century cinema.
He has one of the industry’s greatest faces, which has made him the go-to actor for world-weary figures of authority for most of his career, but the Texas native got his start on Broadway after graduating from Harvard, where he played football.
From the beginning, he was a true individual, which both limited his career opportunities (he wasn’t going to be competing with Robert Redford for roles) and made him magnetic onscreen. Oddly enough, it was his role in the Harrison Ford thriller The Fugitive that earned him an Oscar, but that’s just a testament to how much intrigue he can bring to even the most generic of roles.
After five decades in the business, Jones has established himself as an irreplaceable character actor. Any time he plays a role, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else doing it; he simply is whichever character he inhabits. But while there are almost certainly more roles written expressly for him than he could possibly read (let alone play) in his lifetime, it is also true that he hasn’t always won the parts that he wanted.
In a 1992 interview with the Washington Post, the JFK star revealed that he had missed out on a character that would probably surprise those who know him as the consummate stone-faced tough guy.
“I would like to play Julius Beaufort in the motion picture that Martin Scorsese is going to make of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence,” he said, revealing that he had already been committed to another film when the role came up, adding, “Maybe next time.”
As hard as it is to imagine any other actor in a role that Tommy Lee Jones has played, it is equally difficult to imagine Jones as Beaufort. Wharton’s novel centres on the quiet viciousness of Gilded Age society, which is a far cry from Jones’s typical portrayals of working-class Southerners and members of law enforcement. Beaufort is a wealthy Manhattan banker who pretends to be English to curry favour with his status-obsessed peers, a philanderer and ne’er-do-well, eventually tumbling from grace after one too many dodgy business dealings.
British actor Stuart Wilson played Beaufort in the end as a slimy, urbane creep, but it’s tempting to consider how Jones might have interpreted the character. He studied English Literature at Harvard, after all, and called the novel “beautiful”; perhaps he would have turned the role into a new career trajectory.
Sadly, Jones missed out on the opportunity, and we can only speculate as to what he would have made of it. The Age of Innocence was an aberration for Scorsese, too, and the pair would no doubt have worked well together. All these years later, they have yet to collaborate, even though Jones was practically born to appear in Killers of the Flower Moon.
