Some actors make certain roles their own. Think of the Indiana Jones movies, for example. Can you honestly imagine anyone but Harrison Ford rocking Indy’s hat and whip? Still, no one’s irreplaceable in Hollywood, and every franchise is ripe for recasting and reboots.
The Star Trek movies have given us two Captain Kirks, we’ve had three live-action Spider-Man actors, and don’t even get us started on James Bond. Most actors see recasting as an inevitability, a peril of the job, but others don’t go quietly into that dark night.
Take Alec Baldwin, for example. He really didn’t like when Harrison Ford replaced him as Jack Ryan in the sequel to The Hunt For Red October and wrote about the experience in his 2017 memoir Nevertheless.
Baldwin claims that when the director John McTiernan asked Ford if he knew the studio was still trying to get Baldwin to return for the sequel, the Star Wars movie star told McTiernan, “fuck him”.
Later in the book, Baldwin describes meeting Ford and describes him in less than flattering terms, “Ford, in person, is a little man, short, scrawny, and wiry, whose soft voice sounds as if it’s coming from behind a door.”
Yikes. In a later Huffington Post column, Baldwin would later explain why he was recast in the action movie.
“John told me that during the period of the previous few months, he had been negotiating to do a film with a very famous movie star who had dropped out of his film days before so that he could go star in the sequels to The Hunt For Red October,” he wrote. “John further told me that Paramount owed the actor a large sum of money for a greenlit film that fell apart prior to this, and pushing me aside would help to alleviate that debt and put someone with much greater strength at the box office than mine in the role.”
For his part, Ford has never publicly spoken about replacing Baldwin, so it seems this feud is a bit one-sided. If you love Harrison Ford, check out our list of the best Star Wars characters.