Charlie Sheen has worked with director Oliver Stone in movies like Platoon and Wall Street. However, he thought that he would be starring in one of Stone’s best Vietnam War movies, Born on the Fourth of July. Sheen talked about how his brother Emilio Estevez felt he “needed to be seated” to break the news that Tom Cruise got the part.
Given the history Charlie Sheen had with Oliver Stone, it was natural for him to believe he’d be starring in one of his upcoming projects. However, on a segment of In Depth with Graham Bensinger, the Two and a Half Men alum got real about the confusion he felt not hearing from the award-winning director about Born on the Fourth of July:
We had meetings about it, and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic. And then I stopped hearing from him. 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, 'OK, well, tell him I'm looking for him.'
That would leave me baffled if I had a meeting with the person I thought I was portraying, only to hear nothing again. I’d probably start second-guessing what I did wrong, if the project fell apart or if they had someone else in mind.
While Charlie Sheen heard nothing from Oliver Stone, there was one important person who reached out to him. Emilio Estevez, his sibling who has frequently starred alongside him, was the one who broke the news that casting went in a different direction:
Emilio, he calls me. He says, 'Hey, man. You sitting down?' And I think somebody died, right? 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.
It’s funny that the Major League actor didn’t take the news as hard as his brother imagined. As Sheen was a bankable actor at the time, he probably knew there would be other opportunities coming his way. Still, it's better to hear disappointing news from your brother compared to in a headline.
While Charlie Sheen didn’t “faint” finding out Tom Cruise would be playing Ron Kovac, it doesn’t mean he was happy about the news. He continued to tell Graham Bensinger what hurt the most about being passed over:
It's a big deal. Well, it was also the betrayal factor of it. So I was like, 'OK, 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.
I don’t blame Charlie Sheen for feeling betrayed. It’s very upsetting to have meetings and talks only to hear in the most indirect way that you’re not getting the part. After the Oliver Stone film became one of Tom Cruise’s greatest movies of all time and made him leading star material in the ‘90s, it makes you think about how the military role would have shaped Sheen’s career.
The Primetime Emmy nominee and Oliver Stone may not have gotten to cross paths for one of the most patriotic movies of all time, but fate did bring the two together again. After the former collaborators ran into each other at a bar, here was the interesting exchange Sheen described:
I stopped in and he was there, and I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up. And he was like, 'I just felt like you didn't have any passion for it. I felt like you lost interest.' I was like, ‘Well, I didn't see you. How do you know how much passion I lost or interest that evaporated if we never talked about it again?'
The film/TV actor continued to mention that Stone was using his instincts to determine that Sheen wasn’t the right actor for the job. Sometimes, there’s no rhyme or reason why an actor doesn’t land a part. It could be that Tom Cruise showed Stone the charisma and intensity that the director was looking for to play the sergeant-turned-activist.
Despite the Top Gun actor getting to play Ron Kovic instead of Sheen, he explained why he doesn’t resent Cruise for it:
It wasn't like a thing where I'm going to talk shit about him, because then you see the movie and you're like, 'Oh, fuck, OK. All right. He turned it into that.’ When someone gets a job and does that with it, you're just like, ‘Of course.’ You don't sit there and dissect it and like, 'I'd have done that better.' No, go fuck yourself. That's a brilliant — and he should have won the freaking Oscar.
You can’t deny that Tom Cruise blew it out of the water in Born on the Fourth of July. It was his best performance of that decade, showing the powerful transformation of a young, patriotic Marine's war experiences turning into an anti-war voice. It’s hard to believe he never won an Oscar for that movie, but at least it was his first award recognition role.
The Young Guns actor also made sure to mention that everything may be meant to be the way it all played out. He believed that if he had taken on Born on the Fourth of July, he probably wouldn’t have been able to be in the cast of Major League, one of his most recognized films.
It must have been tough for Charlie Sheen to lose a role he thought was his to someone else. But even if he didn’t get the opportunity to hear the bad news from Oliver Stone, at least his good brother was there to soften the blow.
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