“The rest was history”: Dwayne Johnson could have been Tim Burton’s Willy Wonka
For more than a decade, Dwayne Johnson has been doing virtually nothing on-screen but playing extensions of himself, with the former professional wrestler waiting until he was a quarter of a century into his acting career before deciding that he was interested in taking on a dramatic leading role.
It remains to be seen whether ‘The Rock’ will find himself on the shortlist for an Academy Award or a Golden Rasberry when Mark Kerr’s biopic The Smashing Machine releases, but the chance to reinvent himself outside of his action hero wheelhouse almost landed in his lap 20 years ago in the most unexpected of circumstances.
In all honesty, when it was first announced in early 2003 that Tim Burton was going to be rebooting Roald Dahl with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the betting odds over who would get the nod to play the eccentric chocolatier were probably suspended immediately because everybody knew in their heart of hearts that it was going to be Johnny Depp.
After all, he’d been the filmmaker’s pale-faced weirdo of choice for well over a decade at that point, having led the line in Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Sleepy Hollow by that point, so there was probably no point in anybody else even auditioning because it was Depp’s to lose. Lo and behold, Burton admitted that his regular collaborator was his first choice for the part.
Fortunately, because he’d recently headlined Disney’s blockbuster smash Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the actor was also hugely bankable. That ensured Warner Bros wasn’t going to disagree with Burton’s desire to place him front-and-centre in a $150m family-friendly fantasy, which is hugely disappointing for anyone left wondering what the fuck ‘The Rock’ playing Willy Wonka would have looked like.
As the musclebound monster shared on social media, though, he was honoured just to be considered. “Back in the early 2000s, iconic director Tim Burton had considered me to play Willy Wonka in his remake, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Johnson wrote. “I remember thinking, ‘Holy shit, I’m in’.” The downside was that he wasn’t quite an A-lister at that point, and Depp was freshly minted.
“But that was many years ago when I was just starting out in Hollywood with no foundation of global box office strength or any real acting experience to even pull it off,” he admitted. “The role, of course, went to Johnny Depp who at that time was the biggest star in the world. The rest was history.”
‘The Rock’ raising an eyebrow, calling wayward children jabronis, and squeezing into purple attire to casually allow guests to die during a tour of his chocolate empire sounds like something ripped right out of a Saturday Night Live sketch, but it may have genuinely happened were Depp unwilling to commit to a part he definitely didn’t base on Michael Jackson in any way. It’s bizarre, but goddammit, it’s fascinating to think about.
