During its 37-season run on Fox, The Simpsons has welcomed close to two thousand guest stars. Some of the entertainment legends who’ve lent their voices to the hit animated sitcom over the years include Michael Jackson, Steve Martin, Meryl Streep, Mick Jagger, and three out of the four members of The Beatles. But despite the show’s enormous popularity, not every celebrity has jumped at the opportunity to be a part of it. Prince, for example, reportedly turned down an episode because he hated the script, leading to the whole idea being abandoned.
In 1991, the showrunners made their first of several attempts to get another music icon to voice a character on The Simpsons. For Season 2’s “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish,” they reached out to Bruce Springsteen about narrating the audio version of the Bible that Homer listens to when he thinks he’s about to die. Springsteen said no, and the part went to Larry King instead:
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The following year, Simpsons writer Jay Kogen caught Springsteen as he was coming out of a movie and tried to recruit him to play himself in the Season 3 episode “Radio Bart.” As Kogen explained in a 1998 interview with TV Guide, “I ran up to him. I’m a big guy, and all he sees is a maniac heading towards him. I try to convince him that I work on The Simpsons and that he should do the show. He thought I was a maniac. We never heard from him.” This time around, Sting took the role intended for Springsteen:
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It doesn’t end there. Peter Frampton’s spot in “Homerpalooza”? You guessed it, meant for Springsteen. Ditto for the Alec Baldwin part from “When You Dish Upon a Star.” All in all, Springsteen is said to have rejected offers to be on The Simpsons six times to date—that we know of, anyway. As for why he keeps declining, apparently, he just likes playing music and hanging out with his kids in his spare time—when he’s not going out of his way to make three different cameo appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm in one season, mind you.
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