The Paul Newman role Robert Redford got fired from: “We were sick of it, quite frankly”
As two of the biggest stars of their era, Robert Redford and Paul Newman were usually found at the top of most casting wish lists, and on one occasion, the latter earned an Academy Award nomination because the former had been fired.
Even though they only made two films together, despite trying for years to make a third happen, Redford and Newman will always be inextricably linked in cinema history, which comes with the territory when the pair of pictures they starred in opposite each other are stone-cold classics.
George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting were critical, commercial, and awards season juggernauts, and even though they could never find the right project to reunite before Newman’s death, they remained close friends who often used each other as sounding boards.
Redford was over a decade younger than his counterpart, so it would be reasonable to assume they wouldn’t necessarily be caught fighting over the same parts. And yet, he was the one who signed on the dotted line to play the alcoholic lawyer, Frank Galvin, in Sidney Lumet’s The Verdict.
A booze-soaked, crumpled, cynical, and past-it ambulance chaser wasn’t the type of character Redford was associated with, which is one of the main reasons why he got the boot. The script was one of the hottest tickets in town, with producer Richard D Zanuck telling Ron Base that even the retired Cary Grant had inquired about the lead role, but Redford got the nod.
Ironically, Zanuck and co-producer David Brown were resistant to hiring the star for Butch and Sundance until Newman lobbied on his behalf, and it was the seedier side of the character that turned him off. “When he realised he’d have to let the warts show, let it all hang out, he backed off,” Zanuck said. “Every time a scene was written in which he looked boozy and ill-kept, unshaven, he resisted.”
Redford wanted the character to be a “family man,” he recalled. “Frank Galvin, in his estimation, had kids and was a nice clean-cut guy; a kind of Boy Scout version of the character,” Zanuck explained. “This is now what we conceived at all.” When the two parties couldn’t meet in the middle, drastic action was taken.
Zanuck and Brown decided that they would no longer bend over backwards to accommodate Redford’s demands, or as he put it: “We were sick of it, quite frankly.” He was booted out of The Verdict, and the search for a new leading man led them directly to the exiled actor’s most famous onscreen collaborator.
With Newman in place, Galvin was played exactly the way the screenwriter and producers had always envisioned, and he notched an Oscar nod for the latest in a long line of standout performances. Would Redford have made the shortlist had he stayed? Probably not, as he wanted to deviate too far from the filmmakers’ intentions. His loss was definitely his old cohort’s gain, though, with Newman on phenomenal form.
