Oliver Stone played Charlie Sheen like a fiddle after promising him the role of his lifetime only to drop him at the last minute to cast Tom Cruise!

Tom Cruise is blessed with a skillset unlike any other. The actor’s career since the early 80s has only ever been on the rise, without fail, and Cruise has only become more unstoppable with age. The global fascination that comes with his name is indicative of his status as one of the last true movie stars and it is because of that star persona that his career has turned into a timeless legacy.

Tom Cruise [Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures]

However, for every great man’s climb to the top, there were a dozen others who were passed over or rejected along the way to make room for the star. In Tom Cruise’s case, the rejection was parried over to his contemporary, Charlie Sheen. Despite being the son of Martin Sheen and his inherent familiarity with the studio system, the second-generation Hollywood actor failed to make his mark as a movie star and it all traces back to one unfortunate casting involving the Top Gun star.

Charlie Sheen Gets Passed Over for Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise in Top Gun [Credit: Paramount Pictures]

Throughout the 1980s, Tom Cruise made a name for himself, slowly but steadily, as he pushed through the noise and kept being consistently good in roles, whether main or supporting. His discipline finally caught the eye of casting directors as he made Risky Business the breakout movie of his career

It only took 3 years for Cruise to escalate from dancing in his underwear in Risky Business to flying an F-14 Tomcat in Top Gun. Roles kept flooding in and the actor started scooping them up, earning 3 Oscar nominations in the span of a decade alone. On top of the two films that already established him in the industry as a megawatt crowd-pleaser, The Color of Money and Rain Man further proved he could hold his own against classic Hollywood legends like Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman.

Having worked with Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Barry Levinson all within the course of 5 years, the fame that Cruise accrued cast a large shadow over the filmography of Charlie Sheen. As such, when Oliver Stone came knocking on the door, it was Tom Cruise and not Charlie Sheen he wanted to star in his next hit, Born on the Fourth of July.

Oliver Stone Lost All Respect in Charlie Sheen’s Eyes

Going through a life-altering/affirming event together ties a bond between people who would have otherwise remained strangers for their entire lives. Although in Charlie Sheen’s case, the “event” in question wasn’t cataclysmic in proportion, it may as well have been in his perception. After all, being passed over for what could have been his career’s biggest role after the director specifically promised to give it to him was enough of a trauma.

In a 2001 Playboy interview, Sheen revealed [via The Hollywood Reporter]:

He said we were going to have a relationship like Scorsese and De Niro. He said Al Pacino wanted to do the movie, De Niro wanted to — everybody wanted to — and “I’m going to give you this movie.”

Instead, he heard from a fellow actor, Emilio Estevez that Tom Cruise got the part he was already a shoo-in for. Heartbroken, Sheen later claimed:

I wouldn’t have cared if Oliver had called me personally, based on what we’d been through. We fought two wars you know. But here was a crucial point for both of us, and he couldn’t even call me and say, “I’ve changed my mind”?

Meanwhile, Sheen’s spiraling addiction and decades of rehab became a famous chapter in the Hollywood history books. As such, industry critics began to analyze whether the loss of the Fourth of July lead role could’ve contributed to his darker turn in the future.

Film critics like Caryn James of The New York Times believed, “He was still, for good reason, taken seriously as an actor. Fourth of July would have kept him on that path… What a waste of talent.” Others like Kurt Andersen simply believed in the predestined element of human nature, saying, “I think we’d probably be seeing the same end game.”

In the early 2000s, Charlie Sheen’s career took a drastic turn after the actor bagged Two and a Half Men, the sitcom that would earn him 4 Lead Actor Emmy nominations for 4 consecutive years in a row (2006-2009) and made him a certified comedy legend and a household name.

Born on the Fourth of July is available to buy/rent on Prime Video and Apple TV.