16 Actors Who Lost Roles For Weird, Wild, And Downright Inappropriate Reasons

When Elle Fanning was just 16 years old, she lost out on a movie role for not being sexy enough. "It's so disgusting. There are so many stories like this that I've heard and talked to people about," she said.

1. Elle Fanning opened up about losing a role when she was 16 years old because someone involved with the movie said she was "unfuckable."

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"It's so disgusting. There are so many stories like this that I've heard and talked to people about. I laugh at it now, I'm like, 'What a disgusting pig!'" she said. "I don’t feel like it damaged me, but it definitely made me very aware of myself."

2. Elle was also was passed over for "something big" because she didn't have enough Instagram followers.

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“I’m not going to say what it was, but I didn’t get a part once for something big because — it might not have just been this reason, but this was the feedback that I heard — was because I didn’t have enough Instagram followers at the time,” she said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

3. Sheryl Lee Ralph was fired from a TV pilot because a producer claimed she wasn't "Black enough."

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"It was horrible. I can still remember the way I felt. ... People's thinking was not very inclusive [in the '80s]," she recalled. "You [had] directors who were still trying to tell you how to be Black."

4. Reese Witherspoon was once told that she was "too smart" to play a "young female character."

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Since many studio execs couldn't separate Reese from her Election character, for auditions she was told to "wear a sexy outfit" and "pretend not to be smart."

5. Maggie Gyllenhaal was once told that she was "too old" to play a love interest opposite an actor 18 years older than she was at the time.

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“It was astonishing to me,” she told the Wrap. “It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.”

6. Zoë Kravitz wasn't allowed to even audition for The Dark Knight Rises because she was seen as "too urban."

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She told the Observer, "Being a woman of color and being an actor, and being told at that time that I wasn’t able to read because of the color of my skin, and the word 'urban' being thrown around like that, that was what was really hard about that moment.” However, she went on to star in The Batman as Catwoman/Selina Kyle. 

7. Priyanka Chopra lost out on a movie role because of her skin color — someone from the studio said she had "the wrong physicality."

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She told InStyle, "I was out for a movie, and somebody [from the studio] called one of my agents and said, 'She's the wrong...' ― what word did they use? ― '...physicality.' So in my defense as an actor, I'm like, 'Do I need to be skinnier? Do I need to get in shape? Do I need to have abs?' Like, what does 'wrong physicality' mean?" Chopra told InStyle. "And then my agent broke it down for me. Like, 'I think, Priy, they meant that they wanted someone who's not brown.'"

8. Regé-Jean Page was reportedly asked to audition for the role of Seg-El in Krypton, but then was denied the role because DC Films co-founder Geoff Johns allegedly said that “Superman could not have a Black grandfather."

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Responding to the news, Regé wrote on Twitter, "Hearing about these conversations hurts no less now than it did back then. The clarifications almost hurt more TBH. Still just doing my thing. Still we do the work. We still fly."

9. Catherine Zeta-Jones was told she was "too old" and "too pretty" to play a 20-year-old character when she was only 19 years old.

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She was turned down a role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's show Aspects of Love, and recalled, “I wasn’t even 20, and I remember telling [director Trevor Nunn] I could be as not pretty or as not old as he wanted, but it didn’t do any good.”

10. Mindy Kaling went in for an audition to play herself, but she didn't get the role because she wasn't "considered attractive or funny enough to play [herself]."

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She told the Guardian, "That network [that I auditioned for] is no longer on the air, and The Office went on to be one of NBC's most hit shows in years. I feel like karmically, I was vindicated, but at the time, it felt terrible."

11. Michelle Pfeiffer was in the running for the role of Vicki Vale in the 1989 Batman, but Michael Keaton, her IRL ex-boyfriend and would-be onscreen love interest, prevented her from getting the job because at the time, he was trying to get back together with his ex-wife.

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Robert Wuhl, who played Alexander Knox in the movie, explained, “To put a little fly in the ointment, Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer had previously dated and broken up. At the time, Michael told me he was trying to get back with his ex-wife. Keaton was firmly, and underline firmly, against that casting of Pfeiffer, and he and [producer John] Peters got into it.”

However, Michelle did go on to play Catwoman/Selina Kyle in the sequel Batman Returns. 

12. Henry Cavill was told he wasn't "lean" enough to play James Bond when he was only 21 years old. The director of the movie urged him to lose weight before his next audition.

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He told Insider, "It was his tough love way of saying, 'Look, mate, you're in a Bond screen test. Next time you come to a screen test, really focus hard on making sure you lean up if it's for something like Bond.' And I wasn't by any means chubby, but I was probably overweight for taking my shirt off on camera."

13. Meryl Streep was told she wasn't "beautiful enough" to play Dwan in King Kong. During her audition, she overheard producer Dino De Laurentiis start speaking Italian and ask his son (who'd suggested her for the role), "Why do you bring me this ugly thing?" He didn't realize that Meryl could also understand the language.

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On The Graham Norton Show, she said, "It was sobering as a young girl. So, I said to him [in Italian], 'I understand what you say. I'm sorry I'm not beautiful enough to be in King Kong.'"

14. Olivia Wilde lost out on the role of Naomi Lapaglia in The Wolf of Wall Street and was initially told that she was "too sophisticated" to play the part. Later on, she found out "they actually said 'old.'"

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She told Howard Stern, "I wanna make, like, a translation sheet for Hollywood that's, like, all the feedback your agents give you and then what it really means."

15. Tiffany Haddish lost out on a role because she wasn't "as urban as [they] thought she'd be."

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She explained that during her early days of auditioning, she'd start audio recording on her phone in her bag and would "accidentally" leave her bag in the audition room after she left. Then she'd return to retrieve her bag and listen to the "feedback" in the car. 

16. Gina Rodriguez was once asked to come back wearing a "black dress" after an audition because they "[needed] to know if [she was] pretty enough to be on the cover of a magazine."

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At the time, she said, "'That doesn’t make any sense for the character.' They were like, 'We need to know if you’re pretty enough to be on the cover of a magazine.'"