“This was a clever bastard”: The failed audition that saved Nathan Fillion’s career
The internet can be a force for good and bad; for all the democratisation of skills and knowledge, there are countless ‘try not to cringe challenges’ and, well, basically anything to do with AI.
However, one thing that you can count on the internet for, or at least the people who dwell on it, is that if a niche TV show that some folk like gets cancelled, they will not shut up about it until someone brings it back.
To that, you can now add Firefly, the early noughties sci-fi/western mash-up starring Nathan Fillion that was cancelled after just one season, spent more than 20 years having fans being upset that it wasn’t coming back, and has now been renewed for a second run, albeit in an animated fashion rather than live action.
Created by Buffy the Vampire Slayer mastermind Joss Whedon, Firefly was set in the year 2517 and tracked the adventures of the crew of a ship called Serenity, trying to start a new civilisation in a different galaxy after a civil war, with Canadian actor Fillion playing the lead role of Captain Malcolm Reynolds, which was reprised for the spin-off movie Serenity in 2005.
Fillion’s one big break prior to that was a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, but he had a previous brush with Whedon that had proved pivotal, when he tried out for the character of Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an audition that ended in failure when the role went to David Boreanaz. Angel proved so popular that an equally popular spin-off show was created, which lasted for five years.
Fillion recalled the fateful first meeting with Whedon to Games Radar, saying, “David Boreanaz got the part, and rightly so, I thought he was fantastic. Had I gotten the part of Angel, then Malcolm Reynolds would never have existed!”
Whedon, who by the end of the ‘90s was already a much talked about name in Hollywood, having co-written movies including Toy Story, Twister and Kevin Costner’s mega-budget flop Waterworld, would go on to direct films like The Cabin in the Woods and then the first two Avengers movies for Marvel, before he ended up being unceremoniously cancelled after actors on the sets of his TV shows and movies like Justice League complained about his behaviour.
Fillion, however, in announcing the newest series of Firefly, revealed that he had sought and received Whedon’s blessing in order to bring the show back. On his first meeting with the director back in the ‘90s, he recalled, “I came into an office, and there was a guy sitting in the corner: a mess of red hair, straggly beard, purple sweater with a hole in it. And I thought, ‘This is very nice, these people are kind of relaxed. I wonder when Joss Whedon is going to get here…’ And then I realised, ‘I think this might be Joss! I think this is the guy!’ I had no idea what he looked like before then. Anything I asked him, he had just so much information, just had it all planned and worked out. Everything had an undercurrent, and everything had emotion; this was a clever bastard.”
Fillion, post Firefly, went on to appear in several sci-fi and superhero movies and TV shows, including James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, and last year’s Superman, plus Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.
