John Turturro accidentally turned down a role Stanley Kubrick had written specifically for him
Every actor surely dreams of working with a filmmaker considered one of the greats, even if the experience would be better in theory rather than practice, and you could certainly say this about Stanley Kubrick, wherein getting to say you’ve worked with him would be pretty amazing, but working under his perfectionistic eye, where endless takes are demanded, sounds exhausting.
Most actors who have worked with him can attest to his rigorous methods of working, with The Shining’s Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers both intensely disliking the filmmaker’s methods of shooting; he notoriously made Duvall shoot the baseball bat scene from The Shining 127 times, while actors who never worked with him were still critical of his approach, such that Robert Duvall once called him an “actor’s enemy”.
When it came to his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick hadn’t softened in his approach to pushing his actors to their limits, which led to Harvey Keitel, who was cast in the film, walking out, fed up with Kubrick. “He was doing the scene, and they were just walking through a door, and after the 68th take of this, just walking through a door, Harvey Keitel said, ‘I’m out of here, you’re fucking crazy’. He just said, ‘You’re fucking out of your mind’, and left,” claims Gary Oldman.
One actor who missed out on the chance to be subjected to a million and one takes was John Turturro, who came to discover that Kubrick was actually a big fan of his, with the director specifically having Turturro on his mind when he wrote the part of the pianist Nick Nightingale, which was eventually played by Todd Field.
Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Turturro revealed that he had a phone call with Kubrick about potentially starring in the movie, but his decision to play it cool proved to be a vital mistake: “I didn’t turn down Stanley Kubrick, but Stanley Kubrick called me up for Eyes Wide Shut, and I was, like, shocked that he knew all about me”.
Turturro continued. “And he said, ‘I think you’re a terrific actor,’ and I said, ‘Well, thank you’. He goes, ‘Well, you are’. I was like, ‘Well, I can’t walk around my house saying that to my wife, she’ll hit me over the head with a frying pan’. And he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna send you a script, and I hope you’ll like it’. He goes, ‘You’ll like it.’”
So, with the chance to star in a Stanley Kubrick film, Turturro got excited, but it just wasn’t meant to be in the end, as he never factored in the eccentricities of the man, which could lead to unpredictable outcomes. “He said, ‘I wrote this part for you.’ I didn’t say to him, ‘Whatever it is, I will do’. But I was so excited, I said, ‘I’ll read it, and we’ll work it out’. I was talking to him like a normal person. “The next day, I heard I was unavailable, because I didn’t tell him: ‘No matter what’.”
It seems like Kubrick was disappointed with Turturro’s apparent lack of enthusiasm, so he found a new Nick Nightingale elsewhere, as his trying to be a “normal person” and keep it cool was perceived as nonchalance. The actor, of course, regrets it, noting that he would have liked to work with him, even if just to see how far he’d be able to take the numerous long takes.
It was surely a slight disappointment to be turned down by Kubrick in the end, but sometimes, these things just happen.
