Josh Brolin is a busy man. From appearing in films like Avengers: Endgame and Dune: Part II to the newly released horror epic Weapons, he's become a prolific actor over the past several years. But as it turns out, he was almost in a couple of even more high-profile blockbusters, in the form of James Cameron’s Avatar films.
In a recent interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actor revealed that he was approached by Cameron to participate in his then-upcoming visual effects-heavy behemoth, Avatar. The role that was offered to him was the character of Miles Quaritch.
Quaritch is the chief antagonist of not only the first Avatar film, but has gone on to become a unifying thread and threat across the sequels as well. In actuality, the role is played by Stephen Lang, but Brolin reveals that Cameron came to him first.
Despite this, Brolin ultimately turned down the offer, something which the actor says made Cameron very unhappy. After all, at this point in his career, the filmmaker was coming off of having made the highest-grossing movie of all time and accumulating multiple Oscars, all with Titanic. As such, he wasn’t exactly accustomed to hearing "no," and yet he seemed to be having difficulty getting established stars to sign on to his next big project.
Brolin wasn’t the only big-name actor who turned down Avatar
Cameron originally wanted Matt Damon to play Jake Sully, and even went so far as to offer him a deal in which the actor would receive a pay bump based on a percentage of the film’s box office grosses. Damon, however, declined the offer, too.
For his part, Brolin says he holds no grudges and is happy about the way things worked out. The actor was very busy at the time that Avatar was filming and releasing, appearing in 14 films between 2007 and 2010. He revealed that he did eventually see both Avatar and The Way of Water in the subsequent years and said, “I was very happy for [Stephen Lang]. He’s amazing in it, so it happened exactly like it should have.”
It goes without saying that Avatar would have been a very different franchise with actors like Brolin or Damon at its center, and given just how well things have turned out for Cameron’s monumental franchise thus far, neither he nor audiences should be too hurt by these refusals.
Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang each are delivering career-best work as Jake Sully and Quaritch, respectively, and that promises to only grow truer with Avatar: Fire and Ash.
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