20 actors who almost missed out on their iconic roles, and why

In an interview on the "Glee" season one, volume one DVD, Lea Michele shared what happened on the day of her audition for Rachel Berry.

"I got into a massive car crash outside of the Fox lot, completely totaling my car," she said, per Us Weekly. "When I get into the room for my audition, I literally was still pulling pieces of glass out of my hair. They're like, 'Are you okay?' I'm like, 'I'm fine!'"

Despite the setback, the actress landed the leading role.

In a January interview on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Ralph Macchio, who played Daniel in "The Karate Kid," said he was up against some famous actors for the role.

Although he was cast relatively early in the process, he said it was a "test deal" where nothing was completely set.

"I remember walking by and seeing Charlie Sheen hanging out outside Jerry Weintraub's bungalow, thinking, 'What's Charlie doing here?'" he said.

The actor added that he thinks Nicolas Cage and Robert Downey Jr. were also reading for the role.

During HBO Max's "Friends: The Reunion," the show's cocreators and executive producers, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, said they originally wanted to cast Courteney Cox as Rachel.

"We met with Courteney Cox, and she explained to us why she didn't think she was a Rachel, and that she herself was more of a Monica," Kauffman said. "And she was right."

Jennifer Aniston eventually auditioned for Rachel, but at the time, she'd already signed on to do CBS' "Muddling Through."

The "Friends" production team took a risk by casting her in the role, but luckily the other show fell through.

Matthew Perry was in the same situation as Aniston, according to the showrunners, but they wanted him for the role.

"... When Matthew reads [Chandler's] dialogue, it sparkles ... For the first time through the casting process, we knew there was a character there, and that this was the only guy to play it," Kauffman said during the reunion special.

Like his costar, he'd already signed on with another show, "LAX 2194."

Crane explained that a higher-up from Warner Bros. was at a taping for the sci-fi sitcom, saw that it wasn't going to go anywhere, and told Crane and Kauffman to put Perry on "Friends."

Al Pacino famously played Michael Corleone in "The Godfather," but in a 2004 interview with Movieline, Jack Nicholson said that he was offered the role first.

After he read the script, Nicholson said he turned it down because he didn't think he was right for the role.

"There were a lot of actors who could have played Michael, myself included, but Al Pacino was Michael Corleone," the actor said. "I can't think of a better compliment to pay him."

During a February appearance on the "At Home With the Creative Coalition" podcast, Bill Prady said that his "Big Bang Theory" cocreator, Chuck Lorre, wasn't convinced that Jim Parsons was their Sheldon.

He said they auditioned around 100 actors for the part, but Prady knew Parsons was the one.

"He created that character at that audition," he said. "And he left the room and I turned and I went, 'That's the guy! That's the guy! That's the guy!' And Chuck turned and he said, 'Nah, he's gonna break your heart. He'll never give you that performance again.'"

In the end, they agreed to call Parsons back the next day, and Prady said that he proved Lorre wrong.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Radcliffe's parents met with the "Harry Potter" team on his behalf, and there were aspects of the project that they didn't want him to commit to.

"The deal was to sign on for — I think — six films, all to be done in LA, and my mum and dad simply said, 'That's too much disruption to his life. That's not gonna happen,'" Radcliffe told the publication in 2011.

He said he didn't know about the meeting at the time, but months later everything changed.

"The deal had changed, and it was gonna be to shoot two films, and they'd both be done in England, and so they said, 'Okay, we'll let him audition,'" the actor said. "And then it all went from there, really."

It's hard to imagine a more perfect, real-life Wolverine than Hugh Jackman, but director Bryan Singer originally wanted Russell Crowe to play the mutant role.

Crowe passed on the part and recommended Jackman, but Singer and the studio offered the role to Dougray Scott instead.

According to Variety, Scott was busy with "Mission Impossible 2" and couldn't clear his schedule, which finally gave Jackman a chance.

In a 2019 interview with the Independent, Aaron Paul credited writer and creator Vince Gilligan with turning his career around by taking a chance and casting him on "Breaking Bad."

"No one wanted me — even after I tested, no one wanted me as the guy, and Vince said, 'No, he's the guy — he has to be the guy,'" he said. "Vince played his trump card and said, 'I'm not doing the show unless he's the guy.' So, they were like, 'Alright!'"

During a 2020 interview on "Tell Me More With Kelly Corrigan," Jennifer Garner explained how trying to raise her third child during the busy production schedule for "Dallas Buyers Club" wasn't working.

The biggest issue was that she didn't have time to breast-pump on set.

She said she was ready to quit the film after a particularly grueling day, but her costar, Matthew McConaughey, convinced her she didn't have to choose between her job and her personal life

"From then on, whenever I needed to, I would give him a high sign, and I would go take care of it," she said, speaking of pumping.

According to TV Guide, Jon Hamm had to go in around seven or eight times throughout the audition process for Don Draper on "Mad Men."

"It was one of those things where you're only as good as your last audition, and it just takes one bad one to kind of mess it all up," Hamm said.

Creator Matthew Weiner reportedly loved him immediately, but the execs took some convincing.

"Matt originally sent us tapes on Jon Hamm and Mariska Hargitay's husband [Peter Hermann]," Christina Wayne, former senior vice president of original programming at AMC, said. "Those were his two choices and he said he was leaning more towards Jon. We were like, 'Really? This is the guy you want?' It was not a particularly great audition."

But in the end, Weiner was right about the actor, and they cast him in the iconic role.

In a 2017 interview with W Magazine, Chris Hemsworth said that his younger brother, Liam, competed against him for the role of Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

"I came into the audition with Kenneth Branagh, and thought I nailed it and then never heard anything back," he said. "Months went by and then my brother, my little brother, Liam, was in Australia and sent a tape across and he got a call back, then another call back, and then was down to the last kind of four or five people for it."

While in Vancouver filming "Cabin in the Woods," Chris' manager called Marvel, mentioned that Liam had an older brother, and asked if Chris could audition again.

"So I did an audition in Vancouver in this hotel room with my mum reading Anthony Hopkins' part ... I came in kind of with a little, I guess, motivation and maybe frustration that my little brother had gotten further than me," he said.

It worked out for him in the end because he was cast as the god of thunder.

During a 2016 interview with Steve Adubato, Bob Saget spoke candidly about how he landed the role of Danny Tanner on "Full House."

The producers and creators of the show knew Saget from his days warming up the crowd on "Bosom Buddies" and from his work in the film "Critical Condition."

Bill Maher was their first choice for Danny, but when he turned it down, Saget scored the part.

"He didn't want to dust bust and hug people for 10 years," Saget said, adding that Maher is "very proud to say he turned it down."

In a 2019 video on his personal YouTube channel, Will Smith reflected on his choice to turn down the leading role in "The Matrix."

When the Wachowskis came to Smith and pitched their movie, the actor thought it was strange, so he turned them down to do "Wild Wild West" instead.

He conceded that Keanu Reeves was perfect for the film and that he "would have ruined it."

In the same 2019 YouTube video, Smith said it took some convincing to get him to play the lead in "Men in Black."

"I had done 'Independence Day' the year before, so I was like 'Eh, I'm not doing another alien movie, I don't want to be the alien movie guy,'" the actor said. "So I turned down 'Men in Black.'"

But Steven Spielberg called him and convinced him to reconsider.

In a 2020 interview with Rachael Ray, actor Tom Selleck said that Harrison Ford wasn't originally supposed to play Indiana Jones in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" — he was.

"I didn't turn it down, I earned the part," Selleck said. "I did a screen test, and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas said, 'You got the part.'"

But the actor had already filmed the pilot of "Magnum P.I.," and even though the film's production team didn't have a problem with the conflict, CBS apparently didn't let Selleck take both roles.

"Well, it isn't the worst thing that ever happened," he added. "But it turns out I could've done both."

Whoopi Goldberg told EW in 2017 that she wasn't the first choice for the lead in "Sister Act."

"It was originally [conceived] for Bette Midler," the actress said. "So it was written for somebody who could sing."

Goldberg pitched the alternative idea to have the character, Deloris, be "a one-hit wonder."

"And they were like, 'Whatever you want to do, let's have some fun.' And the rest is kind of wonderful," she said.

There are reportedly a number of iconic roles that Johnny Depp almost played, including Ferris Bueller.

Per ScreenRant, during a 2002 appearance on "Inside the Actors Studio," Depp confirmed that he was in the running for the delinquent high schooler.

But he was unavailable, so the role was famously played by Matthew Broderick instead.

In a 2017 interview with Salon, William Daniels said he wasn't sure about taking the role of Mr. Feeny on "Boy Meets World."

"Teachers are very important in our society and they're very underpaid, so I didn't want to make him a foolish man," he said.

He couldn't get a sense of who Feeny was from the original script, so he quit.

But producer Michael Jacobs promised him a new, different script the next day, and he delivered.

"He wrote the whole thing and came back, and it was something that I could appreciate and wouldn't be embarrassed doing," Daniels said.

When Morgan Freeman first read the script for "The Shawshank Redemption," he fell in love with it.

But when he read the Stephen King novella it was based on and found out that the character they were offering him, Ellis "Red" Redding, was Irish, he was ready to turn them down.

"I read the first page and Red was this Irishman. So I closed the book. I never read another line," he told Yahoo Entertainment in 2014. "I was like, 'I can't play an Irishman!'"

But the production team made it clear that his character wouldn't have to be Irish in the film, and Freeman went on to be nominated for an Academy Award for the role.