“Why not me?”: The one role Dwayne Johnson will always regret not playing
Of all the casting decisions that are made in Hollywood every week, every month of the year, there can’t have been many more puzzling than when the makers of the first Jack Reacher movie decided to put Tom Cruise in the lead role, completely baffling the general public, anyone who had read one of Lee Child’s books, and upsetting people like Dwayne Johnson in the process.
Reacher, lest we forget, is described in Child’s thrillers as an ‘imposing, nomadic figure’, massive in stature, around six foot five and weighing about 15 stone, so of course they cast a brown-haired man who would barely tip the scales at that weight if he was wearing a wet duffle coat with pockets full of rocks, and who measures up at about five foot seven inches, which is slightly taller than a Hobbit.
Apart from that nonsensical choice, the only thing that possibly made even less sense is that once they’d made the first Jack Reacher film starring Cruise in 2012, they not only waited four years to make another one, but actually had the gall to title it Never Go Back as well. Cruise’s star power alone made sure that the two films didn’t lose any money, but it was a close thing.
As mentioned, when the initial casting was done just about 14 years ago, before Lee Child agreed that Cruise was perfect for the part (and five years before he went back on that and said the appalled readers were quite right), there were a few actors in the running including Johnson, who around that time was struggling a little for a hit after 2010’s Tooth Fairy, and had taken to getting back in the WWE ring on occasion.
Talking about missing out on Reacher, a role that he badly wanted, Johnson recalled that he was “In a much different place ten years ago. Tom was the biggest movie star in the world, and I was not. I wanted that role so badly because I was a big fan of the character; I thought I could do him justice. He was a bad dude.”
It wasn’t to be, however, and Johnson had to wait a year or so for a stand-out role as Luke Hobbs in the massively successful Fast & Furious 6 to spark his becoming one of the most in-demand action stars on the planet.
He added, “I got the call saying, ‘Hey, you didn’t get the role’. Look, I didn’t even know if I had a shot for it, but the people around me at that time made me think that I did. I felt like I did, I felt like ‘Why not me?’”
Eventually, Child and the people behind making Jack Reacher a thing on the screen got their ducks in a row and made the Prime Video series Reacher starring man-mountain Alan Ritchson, which has just wrapped up season four, due to hit the streaming site later this year. Ritchson himself has promised the best, ‘most intense’ season of the show yet, which has proved a big success and spawned a spin-off series called Neagley with Danish actor Maria Sten in the main role.
Johnson, meanwhile, will be seen in the live-action version of Moana, plus he has finished filming Jumanji 3 with Jack Black and is working on not one but two more Fast and Furious movies, the first of which, titled Fast Forever, is due out in 2028.
