The terrible movie Glenn Close wasn’t good enough to be in: “She’ll never be a star”
In Hollywood, nobody can predict the future – and if they say they can, they’re lying. After all, if executives could foresee what was destined to be a hit, there’d be no flops, and if actors had a crystal ball, they’d never sign up for a role that renders them a laughing stock. In truth, the people we consider beyond reproach are capable of making boneheaded decisions just like anyone else. For instance, one of the most acclaimed auteurs of the last four decades once declared that Glenn Close didn’t have the star power to be in a movie he wound up disowning anyway.
In 2023, a tell-all behind-the-scenes book was released about one of the 1980’s most colossal misfires. In a world where Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies were raking in hundreds of millions at the box office, receiving critical adulation and Oscar nominations to boot, people began to look back with fascination at the first attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s “unfilmable” 1965 sci-fi novel to the big screen. That movie was, of course, David Lynch’s 1984 Dune, a notoriously troubled production that tanked at the box office and put the late auteur off the idea of ever making another big-budget Hollywood blockbuster.
Max Evry’s A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune – An Oral History promised to pull back the curtain on all kinds of intriguing backstage titbits that nerds could go wild for. The excerpts that got the most publicity, though, were the casting ‘What if?’ stories that the book revealed. For instance, what if Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, or Val Kilmer had won the role of Paul Atreides instead of Kyle MacLachlan in his screen debut? What if Sean Young hadn’t wound up on a plane with producer Raffaella De Laurentiis entirely by chance, directly after upsetting her and Lynch by no-showing an audition in New York?
Arguably, the most interesting sliding doors moment with the movie’s casting concerned the lead role of Lady Jessica, though. The role was played by English actor Francesca Annis, an acclaimed British theatre and television star who had recently made the Hollywood fantasy epic Krull. She admitted in 2021 that the failure of both Krull and Dune affected her film career, telling Deadline, “It’s been a shame for me — or maybe it was a hidden blessing — that the few very big-budget things I’ve done didn’t take off. Otherwise, I would have risen with them.”
Before Lynch chose Annis for the role, though, costume designer Bob Ringwood brought another actor to his attention. “I suggested Glenn Close,” Ringwood revealed in A Masterpiece in Disarray. “I went and saw The World According to Garp, one of her early films. I went back the next day to David and Raffaella and said, ‘I’ve just seen a film, and it’s got this actress called Glenn Close. She’s not pretty, but she’s a bloody good actress.'”
When Lynch and De Laurentiis had Close audition for them, though, they weren’t convinced by her – and it was for the same superficial reason Ringwood touched upon even when he was trying to compliment the future Fatal Attraction star. “After they saw her, I said, ‘Oh, how did it get on with Glenn Close?'” Ringwood revealed. “They said, ‘She’s plain, and she’ll never be a star.’ I said, ‘I think you might be wrong about that.’ They didn’t cast her, and of course, she went on to become an enormous star.”
Unfortunately, Hollywood has always based a lot of its decisions on looks, and Close wasn’t deemed conventionally attractive enough to be cast in Lynch’s sinking ship. Casting director Jane Jenkins claimed she was “seriously considered” and noted, “I thought she would have been fabulous. I was a big fan of Glenn’s.”
However, it wasn’t to be, and maybe that worked out well for Close, who didn’t end up with a big-budget sci-fi disaster on her CV as Annis did. Perhaps, as De Laurentiis alluded to when she said, “I think we tried too hard to find the perfect Jessica,” she and Lynch simply overthought the decision. In the process, they may have lost out on someone who could have been perfect for the role.
