Susan Sarandon names her only perfect movie: “The first part I wasn’t overqualified for”
Susan Sarandon‘s path to acting was unconventional in how quickly and unexpectedly it took off. She got her first screen role in the John G Avildsen movie Joe in 1972, and while it didn’t make her a household name, it was a major role in a production that featured top-tier talent. Four years later she appeared in a movie directed by the cinema legend Billy Wilder, The Front Page, which starred Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
These days, one of Sarandon’s most iconic films is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the archetypal cult movie. She hadn’t even intended to audition for it. In her telling of the events, she simply dropped by the place where they were holding the auditions to say ‘hi’ to Tim Curry, who was a good friend of hers, and he coaxed her into reading a scene. The movie was not well received when it was released, but its afterlife is beyond any filmmaker’s wildest dreams.
In 1980, Sarandon earned her first Oscar nomination for Louis Malle’s romantic crime drama Atlantic City. In it, she played a down-and-out waitress at an oyster bar who dreams of a better life as a blackjack dealer. She further added to her CV, at least as far as cinema fans are concerned, when she played Jane in The Witches of Eastwick. By the late 1980s, she had distinguished herself as one of the most skilled actors in Hollywood, albeit one who was still relatively under the radar.
According to Sarandon, however, it was not until 1988 that she finally got a role that didn’t undersell her talents. Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham is a steamy love triangle romance in the guise of a sports movie. Sarandon plays Annie Savoy, a woman who has an affair with one member of the local baseball team each season. This season, she’s choosing between Crash (Kevin Costner), a veteran brought in to teach a talented new recruit how to harness his talents and avoid his worst instincts, and the new recruit, Nuke (Tim Robbins).
Annie is a fully drawn character. She isn’t cast as a groupie or a punchline or a villain. She is complex, a driver of the plot, and influential in the lives of both men on far more than sexual grounds. Sarandon found the character to be something of a revelation. “It was the first part I wasn’t overqualified for,” she told Business Insider in 2024. “It was a really great character, and even though it was Ron Shelton’s first directorial debut, he had been dreaming on it for so long. It was just such a good script. It was the only script I’ve ever gotten where everything was just perfect, pretty much.”
The studio hadn’t wanted her for the role. She wasn’t a major star at the time, and pairing her with Costner, who very much was, didn’t seem like a recipe for box office success. However, she had a small window of opportunity when everyone else who was offered the part turned it down. She was living in Italy at the time and had a baby, so she flew to Los Angeles, read the script, and flew back the next day. “I just knew that it was such a special part that I humiliated myself and did it,” she said, “And I’m very happy that I did.”
She earned rave reviews for her performance, and despite the studio’s concerns, the film was a huge hit. Shortly thereafter, she won the role of a lifetime when she starred in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, for which she was nominated for her second Oscar.
