The “severe career mistake” Christopher Lloyd will always regret: “What was I doing?”
Film history is littered with near misses and famous casting re-jigs. From Leonardo DiCaprio and Oliver Stone exiting American Psycho to the ever-picky Laurence Fishburne turning down the role of Jules in Pulp Fiction, there is a whole alternative cinema universe out there somewhere.
In many of these instances, the actors or directors or whoever in question go on to famously rue their decisions. Whether it was bad advice from an agent, wrong place, wrong time or creative differences, there tends to be one or two regrets in every star’s career. For Christopher Lloyd, there is one huge misstep that he still can’t stop thinking about.
Already a seasoned stage actor by the time his first acting role came around, Lloyd made his film debut in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where he met an important figure in his life—Danny DeVito. The two went on to star alongside each other in the sitcom Taxi, for which the former won two Emmy Awards as Reverend Jim Ignatowski. This marked the beginning of his roster of eccentric characters.
From there, he went on to his most iconic role to date, Doc Brown in Back To The Future, which further endeared him to the public as a character actor, leading him to the doorstep of other oddball figures, donning the roles of Uncle Fester in The Addams Family and Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
While the actor will always be revered as Doc in the most iconic sci-fi film of the 1980s, things might have been much different if only he’d flipped the script with a very contrasting role around the same time. It turns out, he was offered a role in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. “What was I doing?” he asked at Comic-Con in 2012, “This is the guy who uses the same actors over and over again. That was a severe career mistake.”
It’s not certain which role Lloyd had been offered, whether it was Christ himself or one of the other big hitters, but either way, it could have marked a very different trajectory for the actor. Although it’s not the most famous or critically acclaimed of Scorsese’s impressive back catalogue, it’s just never a good idea to say no to one of the biggest and most revolutionary names in film history.
As the actor pointed out, Scorsese is known to foster long-term relationships with his actors and cast them time and again. Just take Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Harvey Keitel. Who knows, maybe Lloyd could have become one of them. Moreover, the crucially controversial venture of The Last Temptation of Christ helped further cement the career of Willem Dafoe, not only as a great and emotionally charged actor, but as someone willing to take on challenging and unconventional roles.
After all, the film did face some hot water given its subject matter and the titular figure of Jesus’ depiction, and the decision to cast the likes of David Bowie. The role of Christ was so difficult to fill and has such an air of legend surrounding it now that more and more actors seem to claim the role was almost theirs.
But it’s not exactly like Lloyd disappeared into film history and remains an iconic actor from one of the most storied periods in the art form. It’s just a shame we didn’t get to see him do something a little more serious and beyond his typecasting; if only he had been braver with his silver screen exploits at the time.
