The Ron Howard movie Chris Hemsworth saved from extinction: “We really shouldn’t go ahead with this”
It might seem like a pointless thing to say, since everybody knows it, but casting is key. One bad actor is all it takes to turn a potentially great movie into a misfire, and Ron Howard was ready and willing to wash his hands of an entire production after an agonisingly fruitless search for a leading man.
Hedging an entire film on one actor, especially one you haven’t found yet, is nothing if not risky, and it wasn’t something that Howard had encountered before. Dr Seuss’ widow wanted Jack Nicholson to headline How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but he stood his ground because he knew Jim Carrey was the best choice.
Ironically, Carrey was desperate to play John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, but the director was convinced that Russell Crowe was the ideal man for the job. Howard planned to reunite with his Night Shift star Michael Keaton by casting him as the male lead in Splash, but when he said no, he recruited Tom Hanks instead, and ended up launching one of modern Hollywood’s greatest big-screen careers.
On those occasions, he had multiple names, but when it came to his biographical racing drama, Rush, the two-time Academy Award winner was completely stumped. Daniel Brühl was the first major addition to the ensemble as Niki Lauda, and while Howard knew he was the perfect fit, finding the right actor to portray his professional nemesis was a significantly harder nut to crack.
“The James Hunt casting threatened to derail the movie,” he confessed. “Looking at the list, seeing who was available, thinking about it, there was no one who was fitting the mould as well as Daniel did for Niki, and my heart began to sink.” He held auditions, but none of them came close to capturing what he wanted.
He had one half of Rush’s central duo, but without the Ying to Brühl’s Yang, he couldn’t see a path forward. “I began to think we really shouldn’t go ahead with this,” Howard revealed. “It would be compromised.” As fate would have it, though, there happened to be a jacked Australian fella who fancied a change of professional pace.
While shooting The Avengers, Chris Hemsworth realised that after making Star Trek, Thor, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Marvel Studios’ blockbuster crossover one after the other, he was in danger of being forever typecast as little more than a handsome and charismatic lad who loves a green screen.
When he caught wind of Rush, realised he didn’t look unlike Hunt, and knew that he needed a more dramatic role to sink his teeth into sooner rather than later, he had his wife shoot an audition tape from a hotel room in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had it sent to Howard, who was sufficiently blown away that everything was back on track. Or, as the director put it, “Suddenly, it was done.”
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Rush may not have been made at all if it weren’t for Hemsworth’s proactive attitude to his career. While it’s easily one of the best performances from an actor who isn’t exactly famed for their intense thespianism, it didn’t win everyone over, with Hunt’s son, Freddie, insisting that the superhero veteran “basically played Dad like a twat.”
