Johnny Depp Was the 1st Choice for This Robert De Niro Psycho Role
If you think the roles Johnny Depp played are wild, wait until you hear about the ones he didn’t. Most actors have a roster of near misses, roles they lost that went on to be famous or infamous for other actors. In Depp’s case, this role became unceremonious for the actor who beat him. But if you’ve got to lose a role, you might as well lose it to Robert De Niro.
Screenwriter Phoef Sutton was a guest on the Hollywood & Levine podcast on March 28, 2018. Discussing his foray into film, Sutton revealed that the director of his movie, The Fan, originally wanted Depp for the role De Niro played.
Imagine ‘The Fan’ starring Johnny Depp
The Fan is a mere blip on De Niro’s resume. He played a baseball fan who became so obsessed he terrorized his favorite player (Wesley Snipes). Think Cape Fear on the baseball diamond. In 1996, that would’ve been Depp’s first villain. He’d play bad guys in The Astronaut’s Wife, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them later.
“Tony Scott actually wanted to get Johnny Depp,” Sutton said on Hollywood & Levine. “And this was before Johnny Depp was as respected an actor as he was. They didn’t want to do it. He would’ve been good.”
The writer of ‘The Fan’ didn’t want Robert De Niro
Sutton was a writer on Cheers from 1985 – 1981. Two of his feature film screenplays were produced in 1996, Mrs. Winterbourne and The Fan. Once Sutton turned in his adaptation of Peter Abrahams’ book, The Fan was out of his hands, for a little while at least. Still, De Niro would not have been his first choice .
“Far be it from me to object to Robert De Niro being cast but he’s played psychos before,” Sutton said. “This was supposed to be an obsessive fan and it was like God, he did it in The King of Comedy, he did it in Taxi Driver. He’s done this.”
Before The Fan came out, Sutton was still pleased with the caliber of talent making his movie.
“But still, when I looked, I thought well, they got Tony Scott, they got Robert De Niro, they got Wesley Snipes,” Sutton said. “I must’ve done a really good job. Then the first thing they do is they fire me, or they discontinued my work on it. They hire, I believe, Frank Darabont to rewrite it. You can’t object to that too. That’s a big name.”
‘The Fan’ brought Phoef Sutton back
Sutton wasn’t quite done with The Fan after they cast De Niro. Once they were filming, they needed more rewrites. Only then did they call the original writer back.
“Then I get a call and they’re going into production and they need production rewrites,” Sutton said. “They want to hire me to do production rewrites. So I’m rewriting somebody’s rewritten version of what I wrote and the characters of course are completely different. I don’t know what the hell the characters are. They’re flying me up to San Francisco, putting me in a closet and having me write stuff on the set, flying me down to Anaheim where they filmed the baseball stuff.”
Even after all that, Sutton doesn’t recognize the movie.
“There was like 1 scene I had really written,” he said.
