Charlie Sheen had an emotional reaction upon learning that Tom Cruise had beaten him out for the lead role in 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July.
“The thing that is weird is [director Oliver Stone] said, ‘I want you to do Born on the Fourth.’ We had meetings about it and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic,” Sheen, 60, said in an interview with Graham Bensinger uploaded via YouTube on Wednesday, October 29. “And then I stopped hearing from him. We stopped talking about it.”
Born on the Fourth of July is an anti-war movie based on Kovic’s autobiography of the same name. The 1989 film details Kovic’s childhood, military service and paralysis during the Vietnam War. Following the war, Kovic became an anti-war activist.
Sheen shared that he reached out to Stone to check in but was told he was in Cuba. Sheen asked Stone’s team to have him call back when he was available. He then got a call from his brother Emilio Estevez, who delivered the news that he didn’t get the job.
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“Emilio, he calls me. He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right?” Sheen recalled. “I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?’ He says, ‘Cruise is doing Born on the Fourth.’”
The actor continued, “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.”
While Sheen and Cruise were friends at the time, the Two and a Half Men alum confessed that losing the project was “a big deal” to him.
Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
“It was also the betrayal factor of it,” Sheen said. “So, I was like, ‘OK, alright.’ 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 was like, ‘What are you going to do?’”
Sheen acknowledged that you “can’t lose something you never had” since he “didn’t sign a contract.”
After learning the news, Sheen ran into Stone at a bar and decided to bring up losing the role.
“I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up,” he recalled. “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?’”
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While Sheen was hurt by the move, he ended up seeing Born on the Fourth of July and was blown away by Cruise’s performance.
“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 [say] like, ‘I’d have done that better.’ No, go f*** yourself,” Sheen said. “That [was] brilliant — and he should have won the freaking Oscar.”
Cruise played Kovic in the biopic, which also starred Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley and Willem Dafoe. Born on the Fourth of July was a box-office hit and earned eight Academy Award nominations. The role earned Cruise his first nod, but he ultimately lost to Daniel Day-Lewis for his performance in My Left Foot. Stone did receive the Oscar for Best Director.
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