22 Actors Who Almost Quit Before Getting A Major Hollywood Role

Don't give up on your dreams just yet — your big break could be closer than you think!

If you're looking for uplifting content right now, here's some motivation for you — each of these 22 famous actors had thoughts of quitting the business before getting a breakthrough role.

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A-listers like Eric Stonestreet, Laverne Cox, and Gal Gadot are on this list. Crazy, I know!

To share in my astonishment/get some inspiration to pursue your dreams, take a look at the list:

1. John Krasinski

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Krasinski's mother advised him to pursue his dream of acting for two and a half or three years. After two and a half years of trying to make his name as an actor with little success, Krasinski told Stephen Colbert in 2018 that he was prepared to go back home when his mother convinced him to wait just a little longer. 

"I was like, 'So, I'm out. This is terrible. It's so scary. This is the worst. Waiting tables, not as fun as they say,'" Krasinski said. "And she said, 'You know, it's September. Just wait it out. Just wait 'til the end of the year. Don't give up just yet.' I was telling her to come get me. ... And three weeks later I got The Office."

2. Gal Gadot

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In 2020, Gadot revealed to Access Hollywood that she told her husband she wasn't sure acting was for her right before she got her breakout role as Wonder Woman. 

"There's so much rejection in this profession, and it came to a point where I was just like, 'Is it really worth it?'" Gadot said. "We were in LA for a trip, and I was telling my husband, 'Look, we're here now, but we're leaving in two weeks...I don't know if we'll ever come again. I don't know if I want to pursue [acting].' And then, during those two weeks, I had the Wonder Woman audition... Isn't it crazy the way the world, the universe, works?"

3. Monique Coleman

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Coleman told BuzzFeed in a 2016 interview that she was ready to give up on her acting ambitions right around the time when she was called back to audition for the role of Taylor McKessie in High School Musical. 

"I was going through a period, which a lot of actors go through, where you are on the brink of giving up because it just doesn't look like it's going to happen for you," Coleman said.

4. Melissa McCarthy

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McCarthy decided that if she hadn't made it in Hollywood by age 30, she would switch career paths, she told Howard Stern in 2019. Just days before her 30th birthday, she got a call that she had earned the part of Sookie St. James in Gilmore Girls. This was a life-changing role that allowed McCarthy to leave the other part-time gigs she was working at the time.

"[Gilmore Girls] ran for seven years. It was the first time I felt like I could say I was an actress because...I quit my nanny jobs, I quit all the production jobs," McCarthy said.

5. Cindy Williams

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Cindy Williams is best known for playing Shirley Feeney in the iconic TV series Laverne & Shirley, but she told Inside Edition in 2015 that she was going to take a job as a waitress just before getting the part. 

"It was just at the end of this two-year period where I'd gone up for all these parts, been up for all these big parts, and hadn't gotten them," Williams said. "I was kind of depressed at the time, and I was going to get a job as a waitress." 

6. Max Greenfield

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When Greenfield's daughter was an infant, he wasn't getting much work as an actor, he said on Live With Kelly and Ryan in 2020. He gave Todd Milliner, a friend of his who produced the series Hot in Cleveland, a call to see if he could find clerical work instead.

"I thought, 'I don't think I want to do this anymore...auditioning and acting.' It was too much for me," Greenfield said. "And I called our friend Todd Milliner...and I was like, 'Hey, man, can I have a job just in the office? I have no other skills. I can't do anything. There's nothing to fall back on.'"

Hot in Cleveland wasn't in production at the time, so Milliner told Greenfield to wait a little longer and continue with acting. Greenfield soon auditioned for his big break playing the character Schmidt in New Girl. "I was like, 'Alright, I guess I'll go on these last couple auditions I have,' and one of them was New Girl," Greenfield said.

7. William Jackson Harper

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"I was thinking, OK, I could give [theater and acting] up, I could, you know, quit entirely, and I definitely had that thought," Harper said in a 2017 interview with Box Angeles. "No longer will theater and acting be the center of my life. ...  I had sort of come to be at peace with that."

"I was like, well, look, this will probably be my last pilot season. I'm not going to focus on [theater and acting] any more the way I have been...I can't rely on that," Harper added.

That pilot season, he got an audition for The Good Place and scored the role of Chidi Anagonye.

8. Cole Sprouse

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After starring on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and The Suite Life on Deck spinoff series, Sprouse took a five-year hiatus from acting, during which he studied archaeology at New York University. He was working in an archaeological lab when he was encouraged to audition for the part of Jughead Jones in Riverdale. 

"My manager begged me to come out for pilot week, and I was doing photography and archaeology, and I said, 'If I don't get anything...I don't think I'm gonna come back,'" Sprouse said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2018. "And then, sure enough, I booked Riverdale, and it just sort of fell into place."

9. Joshua Bassett

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Right before landing the role of Ricky in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, Bassett nearly walked away from acting, he told Access Hollywood during a 2021 interview. His father's advice was what convinced him to pursue this career path for just a month longer.

"It was, like, audition after audition of me getting really close to things, and the reason why I wasn't getting them was always ridiculous. It was either somebody had a larger social media platform or some ridiculous reason," Bassett said. "I was just getting really frustrated, and I remember telling my dad, 'The joy of [acting] is gone. I don't enjoy it anymore. It's not something I want to do.' And he [was] like, 'You've gone this far, why don't you just wait it out a month?' And I was like, 'OK, fine.' ... I was ready to quit that day. And then just about a month later is when I got the show."

10. Hong Chau

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At the 2018 SAG Awards, Hong Chau told Giuliana Rancic of E! about the many times she contemplated giving up acting before she got the part of Ngoc Lan Tran in the film Downsizing. 

"I've thought about quitting so many times because I've been doing this for 10 years now, and Downsizing is only my second movie," Chau said before adding, "Every once in a while something would come along that would keep you in there for another, like, couple of months before you'd want to quit again, and so luckily I didn't quit and I stuck with it."

11. Milo Ventimiglia

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Ventimiglia nearly stopped acting right before landing the role of Jess Mariano in Gilmore Girls. "I think right before Gilmore was one moment where I questioned if I wanted to stay in acting," Ventimiglia said to Entertainment Weekly in 2017. "I've had three [moments] in my 22 years where I was gonna quit. ... I was gonna go be an auto mechanic."

12. Eric Stonestreet

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"I actually had one of my biggest and lowest valleys about two months before I got the audition for Modern Family," Stonestreet said to Scott Carty in a 2017 interview. "I was really deciding, do I stay in it, because I have enough traction and ... casting directors know me and I've created enough of a career for myself that I could probably continue doing it, or do I split now and start Stonestreet Meats or whatever I wanted to do? I always wanted to be a concierge butcher. I didn't know."

A friend of Stonestreet's, actor Marshall Bell, convinced him to stick with it.  Stonestreet soon got cast in Modern Family and entered one of the greatest phases of his career after this slump. "I went from literally one of my lowest point of my career to winning an Emmy within a year," Stonestreet said.

13. Brie Larson

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After Larson wasn't chosen for a part in United States of Tara, she contemplated going back to school instead of acting. "I was toying with the idea of either studying interior design or marine biology, but then I got a call," Larson said to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017. 

The call was regarding a chance to audition once more for United States of Tara, as the show's crew had decided to recast the part she had been up for. This time around, she was offered the role.

14. Chrissy Metz

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"Literally, I was going to quit acting and move back home, and now my mom's going to be my Emmy date," Metz said to Tpday in 2017 after receiving an Emmy nomination for her role as Kate Pearson in This Is Us. Metz previously shared on the Rachael Ray Show that she only had 81 cents left in her bank account when she booked the show.

15. Rashida Jones

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Jones was planning to go back to school when The Office role of Karen Filippelli came her way. "I said to myself, 'I'm going to do a couple more auditions, and then I'm gonna look at this application for grad school a lot more seriously,'" Jones said in a 2015 Off Camera With Sam Jones interview. "I was co-producing a movie at the time and I was also thinking about going back to school, maybe getting a degree in public policy or law or business, and then, you know, I got a break. I mean, that's really the only thing that brought me back, was The Office."

16. Millie Bobby Brown

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"I think I was just very disheartened by the rejection, which is something that I tell everyone, is like, this industry is...just full of rejection 24/7," Brown told Jimmy Fallon in a 2020 interview. "I was auditioning for commercials for anything, really. I then auditioned for Game of Thrones, and I got a no for that. And then, that's kind of when I was kind of like, oh, this is really difficult, and I guess I really wanted that role."

Following this setback, Brown said "one of her last goes" at acting was an audition for a Netflix show called Montauk, which would later become Stranger Things. She won the role of Eleven, and the successful series is set to premiere Season 4 in the summer of this year.

17. Laverne Cox

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"I was just devastated by, like, turning 40, and my life was kind of in shambles financially, and I had worked and trained a lot, and my dream of being a working actress had not come to fruition," Cox said during an interview for the Paley Center's Pride Month programming, People reported in June 2021. "I was just like, 'I've got to do something else. I mean, who do I think I am? I'm a Black transgender woman — no one's ever done this before, let me go and do something, have a real job or something.'"  

Cox was thinking about going to grad school when she auditioned for the part of Sophia in Orange Is the New Black. The role would later result in her becoming the first openly transgender actor to receive a primetime Emmy nomination.

18. Chris Hemsworth

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“I was about to quit,” Hemsworth told Australian Men's Health in 2021 while discussing his early acting struggles. “I got more and more anxious to the point where I couldn’t harness or use that energy. It was all to my detriment.”

Hemsworth had one final audition in late 2008, however, which was for the lead role of Curt in The Cabin in the Woods. He secured this part, and got the role of Thor in The Avengers film series soon after this project. 

19. Robert Pattinson

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After auditioning for Edward Cullen in Twilight, Pattinson was ready to throw in the towel and abandon his acting career before learning he got the role.

“The audition was one of the worst auditions I did in my whole life. I remember calling my parents and saying, ‘I’m done, I can’t torture myself anymore,’” Pattinson said to Today in 2019, as reported by Metro. 

20. Jon Hamm

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"I moved out to LA [for acting] when I was 25 and I thought, 'If I'm 30 and I'm still waiting tables, it's time to move on to something else,'" Hamm said in a 2018 interview for ABC News.

The Mad Men star ended up celebrating his 30th birthday on the set of We Were Soldiers, which was the first major Hollywood film he starred in. "I was totally thrilled. I had a bunch of my old friends fly down to come see me. And I was like, I'm making a living as an actor and I did it. I made it under the wire," Hamm said.

21. Noah Centineo

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After moving to Los Angeles from his home state of Florida, Centineo auditioned for many roles, which led to him shooting a television pilot. Although the pilot wasn't picked up, Centineo signed a contract for the job, which stated that he couldn't take on auditions for six months. This time period was very discouraging for the To All the Boys I've Loved Before actor.

“My purpose was just to act, and you take away someone’s purpose and you kind of deteriorate them,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2018. Just as he was about ready to give up on acting, Centineo booked the part of Jesus on the Freeform series The Fosters.

22. KiKi Layne

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While she was a guest on the Tamron Hall Show in 2021, Layne said she was feeling discouraged about her acting career after she moved to LA. She asked the universe for a sign, then borrowed some tarot cards from her roommate to see if they held any wisdom about what to do next. 

"I grabbed those cards, and I don't know anything about tarot; all I knew is that a lot of the cards that I saw, that I was pulling for myself, were cards that my friend had pulled for me some months prior," Layne said. "I just saw...a repeat of some of those messages that I had gotten earlier in the year, [that said], yes, I'm supposed to be here. I was supposed to make that move. And that's that." 

Less than two weeks later, Layne got an audition for one of her first major roles playing Tish Rivers in If Beale Street Could Talk.

So, keep on goin'. That breakthrough of yours could be right around the corner!

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