The one role nobody wanted Brad Pitt to play: “Do you really want him in this?”
It’s not the worst position for an actor to find themselves in, all things considered, but one of the greatest obstacles Brad Pitt faced while making his way towards the top of the industry was that he was so damned handsome.
He wanted to test himself as a performer and tackle more dynamic, dramatic, and against-type roles, but studio executives and filmmakers weren’t too interested in having him play them. To many, he was one of Hollywood’s prettiest faces, and little effort was made to shift that perception.
His breakout turn in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise, a scene-stealing cameo as the perpetually stoned Floyd in Tony Scott’s True Romance, the brooding Louis de Pointe du Lac in Interview with the Vampire, and the smouldering Tristan Ludlow in Legends of the Fall were all good and/or successful movies, albeit ones that traded heavily on how easy Pitt was on the eye.
The only outlier during that period was his turn as a psychotic murderer in 1993’s Kalifornia, which had the misfortune of bombing at the box office despite featuring Pitt’s best performance ever at the time. Fortunately, salvation was lurking around the corner, and it came with a pair of back-to-back successes from two high-powered auteurs.
David Fincher’s Seven hired Pitt to play a dogged, determined, and world-wearied detective on the hunt for a sadistic serial killer, with Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys allowing him to cut loose and embrace eccentricity in the first Academy Award-nominated performance of his career. Those were the kind of parts he wanted, and as much as he chased them, there was still pushback.
“Brad was hungry; he wanted to do something raw, something that would push him out of his comfort zone,” Fincher told High on Films. The filmmaker wanted him to be David Mills, and he was confident he had it in his locker to pull it off, only for the boardroom to voice concerns.
“They were like, ‘Do you really want him in this?'” Fincher revealed. “And I said, ‘Yes. Absolutely.'” He wasn’t the first choice for Mills, but after Denzel Washington repeatedly turned Seven down despite having the script constantly rewritten in an effort to accommodate him, Pitt seized the opportunity with both hands.
It’s easy to look back at Seven and praise the casting, but it was a long road. Morgan Freeman wasn’t at the top of the list for William Somerset either, and if Fincher had gotten everything he asked for at the beginning, then Washington and Gene Hackman could have led the ensemble.
Instead, not only did Pitt vindicate Fincher’s decision to cast him, but the character marked a drastic shift in the parts he played in the years to come. No longer constrained by his looks, it’s not a coincidence that whereas he’d struggled to find substantial roles to sink his teeth into before Seven and 12 Monkeys, smaller-scale and lesser-heralded projects like Sleepers, Fight Club and Snatch were suddenly a lot easier to come by.
