Charlie Sheen was the face of several major films in the 1980s, but there’s one starring role he missed out on that felt like “betrayal.”
By the late 1980s, Sheen had already appeared in films like Lucas, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Platoon and Wall Street, the latter two of which were directed by Oliver Stone. As a result, Sheen thought he had a good chance of being cast as Sergeant Ron Kovic in Stone’s Vietnam War project “Born on the Fourth of July.”
However, when it came down to decide on the role, the nod went to Tom Cruise. In a new episode of “In Depth with Graham Bensinger,” released Thursday, Sheen, 60, detailed how Emilio Estevez, his brother and fellow actor, had to deliver the bad news to him.
“Emilio, he calls me. He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right?” Sheen said, via the New York Post.
“I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?’ He says, ‘Cruise is doing Born on the Fourth.’ I love that Emilio thought that I needed to be seated to get news he thought was going to make me faint. I mean, what are we doing here? It’s a movie.”
Sheen did admit to Bensinger that it was “a big deal” that Cruise got the part over him, adding that he couldn’t help but feel a sense of being let down–not by Cruise, but by Stone.
“Well, it was also the betrayal factor of it,” Sheen said. “So I was like, ‘Okay, all right.’ You know, Oliver’s been a fan of Tom’s for a long time. It’s a different movie if Tom does it than if I do it.”
Sheen claims Stone hinted that he was planning on casting Sheen as Kovic, even having dinner with the “Two and a Half Men” star and the former Marine Corps sergeant and anti-war activist himself.
“We had meetings about it, and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic. And then I stopped hearing from him,” Sheen remembered. “We stopped talking about it, and I reach out to Oliver, and I’m told that he’s in Cuba. Whatever. This is like 1988 or ’89, right? I’m like, ‘Okay, well, tell him I’m looking for him.’”
In the end, Sheen praised Cruise for his portrayal of Kovic, which was nominated for an Oscar.
He also added that if Stone had followed through on their “handshake” agreement, he might not have had the chance to star as Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn in 1989’s Major League, which was a major breakthrough role.
Sheen just finished his ‘hardest job’
In addition to telling Bensinger about the missed acting gig that left him feeling most disappointed, Sheen also revealed his “hardest job” in another portion of the conversation.
It wasn’t an acting role, either. Sheen says his most arduous task was putting together his recently-published memoir, The Book of Sheen.
“It would be really exciting for people to talk about my work again,” Sheen told Bensinger. “And I’m getting a taste of that with the book, you know? A lot of people are talking about the doc and yeah, that is a version of my work, but I’m not a producer on that for a reason, and I can’t say I was a hired gun for that, but I didn’t really, I couldn’t really shape that in the way that it ultimately what was presented.”
“The book though I did, and that I’m really proud of. That’s the hardest job I’ve ever had, and the most rewarding hands down period, the end,” he added.
