Credit: Alamy
Anyone who has ever had a job interview, which is pretty much all adults not born into money, will know the feeling of walking out and wondering if you nailed it, or whether the strangers you just tried to convince of your wondrous qualities were currently laughing themselves silly thinking ‘what an idiot’.
For actors, the equivalent is, of course, the audition, and even someone as talented as Uma Thurman has had bad ones.
Many Hollywood actors will be able to tell you of the point they got successful enough that they no longer had to read or audition for parts, and their occasional rage when a director demanded it regardless, but when you’re in the initial stages of a career on screen it is a necessary evil, and back in the early 1990s, as a young Thurman enjoyed the praise and attention her turn in 1988’s romantic drama Dangerous Liaisons, she found herself in the running for the latest Brian De Palma movie.
At that point, De Palma was arguably at his peak as a director, seven years after Scarface and critically lauded for movies like The Untouchables and Casualties of War. Expectations were high for his adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a black comedy about a Wall Street hotshot whose mistress runs over a black teenager, putting him in the spotlight of an alcoholic reporter.
The cast of the movie, including Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman, reflected the calibre of the director and the excitement over the best-selling book, but in fact it could have been even more impressive. De Palma originally wanted Jack Nicholson for the lead, and elsewhere Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Tom Cruise were considered, all of whom were enormous stars of the ’80s. And the question of who would play the mistress, Maria, was also up in the air.
De Palma wanted Uma Thurman, then 19 years old, and she had made quite an impression in the screen test, but also in the running was Melanie Griffith, who it was thought could bring much more of a comedic slant to the role. De Palma turned to Tom Hanks for advice, and he thought she was too young to play the part, but he agreed to read with her at a follow-up audition nonetheless.
Together with the casting director Lynn Stalmaster, the three men had Thurman come into the room decorated with directing heroes like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles as De Palma introduced her to Hanks, a moment he would later recall in saying: “When she walked in here I was stunned.”
De Palma agreed, adding, “She’s quite attractive, almost erotic. She certainly has a sense of play.”
De Palma felt Thurman did well enough that Griffith should not be a shoo-in for the part, but Hanks had other ideas. As the three big shots discussed Thurman vs Griffith and even superficially rated them in terms of appearance and desirability, Stalmaster remarked, “I’m overwhelmed by Uma. I didn’t expect this. I can’t get over it.”
But Hanks countered that her audition was “more suited to a high school play”, and said “I can’t act with Uma.”
That, for some reason, rather than De Palma’s call as the director, proved to be the pivotal moment, and Griffith got the part over Thurman. Whether or not that decision contributed to the film becoming a catastrophic flop on its release, who knows, but it lost tens of millions at the box office, and the film earned a number of Golden Raspberry Awards, including one for Griffith as ‘Worst Actress’ and one for De Palma as ‘Worst Director’.
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