“I was not approved”: the Oscar-nominated role Michael Douglas regrets not playing
Michael Douglas is one of the greatest actors of his generation, having inspired countless young performers to follow in his footsteps, with his list of accomplishments in front of the camera long and glittering. However, had things gone a little differently early in his career, we might never have seen his face on our screens.
Famously, Douglas started his career as a producer. After his father, the great Kirk Douglas, was denied the opportunity to star in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he handed his passion project over to his son, who, after being told he wouldn’t be playing Randle McMurphy, ended up producing the massively successful psychological thriller. This entitled him to a share of the film’s spoils when it won ‘Best Picture’ at the Oscars, his first of two statuettes.
This isn’t the only time Douglas wasn’t allowed to star in a movie he had a hand in creating. He was instrumental in the development of the 1984 sci-fi romance movie Starman, persuading Columbia Pictures to purchase the original script and then worked on the movie for five years before it finally hit screens.
The film, which was directed by the one and only John Carpenter, is about an alien who comes to Earth in search of human contact, taking the form of Scott Hayden, a recently deceased young man living in Wisconsin. This leads to an improbable romance with Hayden’s widow, Jenny, played by Karen Allen, as well as a plight involving the US military.
Douglas initially had his heart set on playing Scott, but the people above him had other ideas. “I was a television actor trying to make it in feature films,” he told The Wrap, “I was not approved. I would have loved to play Starman”.
It came out later in the 1980s that Starman had been in development hell since the late 1970s. At this point in time, Douglas would have been best known for The Streets of San Francisco, a police procedural on ABC.
He’d had a few major film roles too, notably in the nuclear drama The China Syndrome, but was far from the leading man he would become down the line. Ironically, the same year that Starman was finally released, Douglas would star in Romancing the Stone, the swashbuckling adventure movie that proved he was capable of helming a big project.
Poor old Douglas was only granted an executive producer credit for Starman, and as for Scott Hayden, he eventually wound up being played by Jeff Bridges; both fortunately and unfortunately for the execs, he was fantastic.
He and Allen had an amazing chemistry as the two (literal) star-crossed lovers, and Bridges was even nominated for an Oscar for his performance, which was eerily similar to how Jack Nicholson won ‘Best Actor’ for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Bridges has spoken about how he would love to revisit the world of Starman, and maybe if they do end up making a sequel, Douglas will finally get a chance to be on screen.
