- Ross Malinger, Sleepless In Seattle, 1992 Wanted: a sassy sprog (indeed, an early wedding planner!) for a widowed Ton Hanks. So, who ya gonna choose? Ross with eight years and films behind him or Jason, untried, untested, and, unfortunately for him, aged 12. Movie stars want young kids, or they appear old. (Hanks’ real son, Colin, was all of 15). Ross malingered on through 34 screen roles. Jason (Francis Coppola’s nephew) finally made his debut, at age 17, in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, 1987, and scored 68 credits by 2020, including five more Anderson movies.
- Jake Gyllenhaal, Donnie Darko, 2001. Jason was first Donnie choice until proving unavailable. Next? Vince Vaughn (“I’m too old”) and Mark Wahlberg (“I want to play him with a lisp”), And so, two other stars were born. Gyllenhaal and director Richard Kelly. After his October Sky breakthrough, Gyllenhaal was frantically running around loads of auditions. He remembered pulling off the road to finish the script by Richard Kelly, 23 and just out of film school. (“Letting someone else direct was never an option!”) “It beautifully captured the experience of moving into adulthood… This is what my adolescence felt like… although I have never spoken to rabbits.”
- Will Forte, She’s Funny That Way, 2013. When director Peter Bogdanovich rescued his long dropped ‘90s project called Squirrels to the Nuts (a Lubitsch line from Cluny Brown, 1945), he asked Jennifer Aniston to join the screwball comedy. He also took her clever advice about giving Delta to Kathryn Hahn as Delta and choosing Will Forte as playwright Joshua Fleet.
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 3