Brad Pitt Convinced David Fincher to Cast Helena Bonham Carter in ‘Fight Club’ Using Her Love Scenes
Brad Pitt played a huge part in Helena Bonham Carter being in Fight Club. Bonham Carter might not have been on David Fincher’s radar if Pitt hadn’t shown him her performances.
Helena Bonham Carter’s love scenes won her the ‘Fight Club’ role
Carter played love interest Marla Singer in Fincher’s 1999 cult hit. But she wasn’t the director’s first choice. Many names floated Fincher’s way, including Courtney Love and Reese Witherspoon.
But Love was in a relationship with Pitt’s co-star Edward Norton at the time. Fincher felt including her in the movie might have been a bit too problematic. Fincher also believed Love was too obvious of a choice to play Marla.
Fincher nixed his other option, Witherspoon, primarily due to her age.
“She’s somebody else who the studio brought up,” Fincher once told Total Film (via Brad Pitt Press). “I think she’s amazingly talented, I just thought she was too young. When you realize Tyler doesn’t exist and The Narrator’s been abusing Marla himself, it needed to be somebody who, for lack of a better explanation, was there out of choice; not somebody who didn’t know any better.”
Pitt would eventually pitch Fincher Bonham Carter based off of one of the actor’s films.
“I was at Brad’s house and he goes, ‘Look at this actress; don’t think about it, just look at this actress’ and he put on the sex scene at the end of The Wings Of The Dove, when Helena’s just so unbelievably sad. I thought she was emotionally exquisite in that movie,” Fincher recalled.
Helena Bonham Carter originally didn’t get ‘Fight Club’
Bonham Carter would meet Fincher personally about the role. Although she was interested, she had her doubts. Fincher theorized it was Bonham Carter’s mom that made the actor unsure of doing Fight Club.
“I think her mother had read the script and just thought it was awful and I think that’s partly why she was ambivalent about it. Actually, ambivalent may be giving the material the benefit of the doubt. She may have been repulsed by it,” Fincher remembered.
Bonham Carter corroborated the theory.
“Mum put the script outside her bedroom, because it was a pollutant,” she said. “I didn’t get it when I first read it, either. I thought, ‘This is weird. Is this message particularly life-enhancing?’”
Her talk with Fincher helped change her mind about the script.
“But once Fincher explained it to me, I just thought, ‘I want to go with this: go with him. I completely get your point-of-view now.’ I wrote him a huge fax about my misgivings, you know? In it I just said, ‘I’ve got to play it with a big heart.’ Marla had to have a heart, otherwise she’d be just a nightmare. I was talking myself into it. By the end of the letter I’d convinced myself to do it,” Bonham Carter said.
The Harry Potter star also enjoyed how the role was so much different than anything she’d ever done before.
“’At least somebody sees beyond the corset,’ you know,’” she remembered thinking to herself. “That and at the same time it was just around the Oscar thing so in my cynical way I just thought, ‘Oh, this is what happens when you’re up for an Oscar.’”
Courtney Love claimed Brad Pitt got her fired from doing ‘Fight Club’
Love’s version of her Fight Club experience was a bit different than Fincher’s. The singer claimed that it was Pitt that booted her off the project because he wanted to play Kurt Cobain in a film.
“I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt,” she said on WTF With Marc Maron. “I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the f*** do you think you are?”
Love asserted that the ensuing conversation between herself and Pitt resulted in Pitt having her fired from the movie.
“’I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit. They’re really good social justice movies, but…if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad,’” she remembered telling him.
However, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to a source that alleged Pitt had nothing to do with Love’s departue from Fight Club.
