Michael Shannon

Posted on by Tony CrawleyCategories:Actors
  1. Chris Pine, Smokin’ Aces, 2006.     Legend has it that Shannon was dumped for  being rude to a costume designer. (Too deep into his neo-Nazi role). Ten seconds into his audition and the part was Pine’s.  The Guardian critic Philip French declared the considerable cast (Ben Affleck, Peter Berg, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta, Ryan Reynolds) were wasted “on a picture as slick and toxic as the oil spill from the tanker, Exxon Valdez.”
  2. Tom Hardy, Lawless, 2011.    Shannon had to quit when the production was momentarily shuttered.  Hardy took over as the oldest of three moonshining Bondurant brothers in Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition. And stole the entire movie.  Shannon  became, instead,  the flagellating FBI agent in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, 2010-2014. 
  3. Josh Brolin, Inherent Vice, 2014.   For the troubled cop known as Bigfoot Bjornsen, director Paul Thomas Anderson mulled over Jim Carrey and Shannon – who’d had been here before. (Many times).  Brolin’s Bjornsen, said Variety critic Scott Foundas, was “a Joe Friday primed to explode.”
  4. Adam Driver, Logan Lucky, 2016.   For his first movie since retiring with Behind the Candelabra,2013, director Steven Soderberg had to change the heister brothers in his “anti-glam version of an Ocean’s movie”- from Matt Damon and  Channing Shannon and Driver. Made no difference. Daniel Craig still stole the show as bomber Joe Bang.  
  5. Josh Brolin, Deadpool 2, 2017.   With Ryan Reynolds reigning supreme as the wise-cracking, cancer-ridden, super smart-ass hero, who could oppose him as Cable, the heftily armed cyborg? (“You’re dark – sure you’re not from the DC Universe?” our Marvel hero asks him). Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld wanted Russell Crowe – and even after Brolin signed, pushed for Jon Hamm. Other Mr Impregnable ideas included Alec Baldwin, Pierce Brosnan, David Harbour, Stephen Lang, Brad Pitt (he shot his Vanisher cameo in two hours), Michael Shannon and the wrinkly brigade (yawn) Mel Gibson, Dolph Lundgren, Ron Perlman, Kurt Russell, Arnold Schawarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. Already Marvel’s villain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, Brolin had a four-film deal, to reveal more about Cable and, doubtless, extra gags about his stepmother Barbra Streisand’s 1982 Yentl.

 Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls:  5