25 Actors Who Turned Down Huge Roles in Movies

In the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, a woman played by Gwyneth Paltrow narrowly makes it onto a train — and, in an alternate storyline that plays out parallel to the first, misses the train. The whole film goes back and forth between the two Paltrows (the one who caught that subway, and the one who didn’t) showing how this single small action can have enormous consequences on someone’s life. Ashton Kutcher fans call this “the butterfly effect.”

I don’t know if Sliding Doors is a masterpiece of cinema, but it is a fun thought experiment. Once you start pondering the little decisions that send your life in one direction or another, you can’t stop. And that same sort of thinking can be applied to movies, where every completed film, from the most beloved masterpiece to the most reviled disaster, is the accumulation of hundreds or maybe thousands of little decisions. Change one or two of them, and the entire picture could look totally different.

To see this theory in action, you needn’t look any further than the list below. It contains nothing but huge movie stars, all of whom turned down the chance to play huge roles in huge movies. Generally speaking, these situations worked out in the end for everyone. The actors were largely unharmed and made other successful projects. The movies they turned down survived and even thrived with other stars in the key roles. And those replacements often became major movie and TV stars in their own right, something that might not have happened had the directors’ initial choice said yes in the first place.

Here are 25 movie stars who all have their own version of Sliding Doors within their careers to think about. I’m sure Gwyneth Paltrow has her own examples, but she just missed the cut this time. (Sorry, Gwyneth. Maybe you make the next one.)