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Charlie Sheen hasn’t forgotten the moment he learned he lost out on the starring role in “Born on the Fourth of July.”
During Thursday’s episode of “In Depth with Graham Bensinger,” Sheen, 60, recalled that his brother, Emilio Estevez, was the one who informed him that Tom Cruise was cast as Sergeant Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone’s 1989 Vietnam War movie.
At the time, Sheen had already worked with Stone, 79, on 1986’s “Platoon” and 1987’s “Wall Street,” so he figured he was a shoo-in to star in “Born on the Fourth of July.”
“Emilio, he calls me. He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right?” Sheen remembered.
“I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?’ He says, ‘Cruise is doing Born on the Fourth,'” Sheen 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.”
But Sheen did acknowledge that Cruise — who was friends with the famous brothers at the time — landing the role over him was “a big deal.”
“Well, it was also the betrayal factor of it,” the “Spin City” alum said. “So I was like, ‘Okay, all right.’ 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.”
Sheen also claimed that Stone, 79, initially made it seem that he was a lock to play Kovic.
“We had meetings about it, and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic. And then I stopped hearing from him,” Sheen recalled. “We stopped talking about it, and I reach out to Oliver, and I’m told that he’s in Cuba. Whatever. This is like 1988 or ’89, right? I’m like, ‘Okay, well, tell him I’m looking for him.'”
“You can’t lose something you never had,” Sheen noted. “I didn’t sign a contract. There was a handshake.”
But Sheen did eventually confront Stone over the casting drama at a bar.
“I stopped in and he was there, and I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up,” Sheen revealed. “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?'”
Despite being bummed about what transpired, Sheen applauded Cruise’s Oscar-nominated performance in the film.
“It wasn’t like a thing where I’m going to talk s–t about him, because then you see the movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, Okay. All right. He turned it into that,'” Sheen told Bensinger.
“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 like, ‘I’d have done that better.’ No, go f–k yourself,” the “Two and a Half Men” alum added. “That’s a brilliant — and you should have won the freaking Oscar.”
In addition, Sheen acknowledged he probably wouldn’t have been cast in 1989’s “Major League” if he did “Born on the Fourth July.”
“I’m just pretty sure that one would have gotten in the way of the other, and if it’s not true, that’s what I’m going with,” he said.
English (US)