10 Actors Who Turned Down Roles In Star Wars

Today, every actor interested in a seven-plus-figure salary is ready to travel to a galaxy far, far away — but back in the 1970s, no one in Hollywood knew what the heck “Star Wars” was going to be. As much of a technical and narrative genius George Lucas was, the vision for the initial 1977 film was as ambitious as it was confounding to those outside his head. Actors had to make sense of terms like “Jedi” and “Clone Wars” to broach what Lucas was going for.

Nearly every major character in the “Star Wars” franchise went through multiple current or future A-list actors before finding the right fit. Some of these actors turned down outrageous offers outright, and took off without a backward glance — some regard their shortsighted decisions with sincere regret, despite the fact that they went on to experience extraordinary success regardless. 

From the founding of the franchise to the prequels and the post-Disney era, here are some of the actors who turned down roles in “Star Wars.”

In the years directly leading up to the release of the original “Star Wars” film in 1977, there wasn’t an actor with the same heat as Al Pacino. The actor had been nominated for four Academy Awards for “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Godfather,” and its sequel. Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas were already close friends and creative collaborators at the time as well — so, naturally, Pacino was Lucas’ first choice for the role of Han Solo.

In 1975, when he was starring in a regional production of the Brecht play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” Pacino received the “Star Wars” script from Lucas with an offer attached. According to Pacino himself, it included an extraordinary sum of money — so much money that he had a difficult time turning it down, despite the fact that he couldn’t understand the script in the slightest. He even sent the script to his mentor who was just as befuddled by the space wizards and cyborgs Lucas was trying to sell. Thus, in spite of the major payday at stake, Pacino passed on Solo.

In 1977, the actor starred in Sydney Pollack’s “Bobby Deerfield,” a critical and commercial failure by any standard — though he was hardly in the position to be helped or hurt even by a role in perhaps the most popular film ever made. 

Harrison Ford, on the other hand, was basically unknown to anyone but Lucas (who had cast him in “American Graffiti”). Pacino turning down the part meant Lucas now had to audition other actors – which led to him asking Ford to attend auditions as a reader. Ford made an unlikely impression, and the rest was history. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly several decades later, Pacino joked that he had been “in the mood to make Harrison Ford a career.”

Before George Lucas landed on Harrison Ford, however, he considered many other non-Pacino options for the role of Han Solo. The least imaginative of these potential choices was Burt Reynolds.

This isn’t to say Reynolds would’ve been a bad choice for the character — just that he was a tad played out as a Western action star by the mid-’70s. Pulp classics like “Skullduggery” and “White Lightning,” and especially the thriller “Deliverance,” had turned him into the ideal archetype of the Hollywood leading man. He was dangerous and cool, yet roguishly charming in a way that manufactured a sense of honor even when he was cast as an antihero. Admittedly, he was the Han Solo on paper before Han Solo had even been typed into Lucas’ script.

Fresh off “The Longest Yard,” Reynolds was offered the role by Lucas outright. He turned it down because, as he later reflected, he was never personally a fan of science fiction. Before “Star Wars,” the genre was largely synonymous with films like “Planet of the Apes,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” No one expected Lucas’ bizarre vision to resonate so strongly, least of all traditionalists like Reynolds.

In hindsight, however, though Reynolds didn’t seem to develop a love for sci-fi, he did regard passing on “Star Wars” as a missed opportunity (though he did star in “Smokey and the Bandit” that same year). It’s one of several regretful passes in his prolific career, including James Bond in the Pierce Brosnan era and Richard Gere’s character in “Pretty Woman.” Fittingly, this reverse-radar would come in handy when Reynolds earned his first Oscar nomination for “Boogie Nights,” a film he turned down seven times.

Kurt Russell was another hotshot considered for the role of Han Solo — though that wasn’t the only character he was being considered for. Though by no means anywhere close to the movie star status he would achieve in the ’80s, Russell was a reliable, steadily rising leading man with resourceful parents and a healthy relationship with the Walt Disney Company. He had just enough experience, credibility, and earned confidence to approach “Star Wars” with a healthy amount of skepticism.

What Russell didn’t have was the star-power to command the kind of instant offers Al Pacino and Burt Reynolds had received. Instead, George Lucas brought him in to audition for both Han and Luke Skywalker. Russell is actually one of very few actors whose failed “Star Wars” auditions are available to watch online. He’s not doing what Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill would go on to do with either role, but he is bringing the clean charm casting directors were eager to package up and sell to directors.

In recent years, Russell has been unclear about what wound up happening after his audition — what we do know is that he wasn’t offered the role. He’s joked in the past that he wasn’t in the position to turn down anything at the time, least of all a named character in a feature film, but he’s also said that Lucas’ failure to commit to his casting drove him to take a starring role on the short-lived NBC Western drama “The Quest” instead.

The series was hardly the career-maker Russell surely hoped it would be. Of course, John Carpenter soon helped him find his way back to science fiction, turning him into one of the genre’s all-time greatest actors.

Since even before the Walt Disney Company fully acquired Lucasfilm back at the beginning of the 2010s, the House of Mouse and the galaxy far, far away have worked together in harmony. Once upon a time, however, they were the very entity that stood between George Lucas and his first choice for Princess Leia, which was Jodie Foster.

This counterfactual might confuse astute cinephiles at first. When Lucas was casting “Star Wars,” Foster wasn’t even 12 years old, and her biggest role at the time had been in the Martin Scorsese dramedy “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” As she herself confirmed much later, Lucas had actually been initially searching for a child actor to play Leia — and while she hasn’t explicitly disclosed how close she was to accepting an offer, Christopher Walken claims to remember screen testing with her for the role of Han Solo (by his own account, Walken himself was no closer to being cast than the hundreds of other hopeful Soloists who came in after Al Pacino declined).

Regardless, Foster ultimately was forced to turn down the opportunity to play Leia due to “Star Wars” conflicting with her previously established contract with Disney (presumably for the 1976 film “Freaky Friday”). The same year Lucas’ film hit theaters, she was nominated for an Academy Award for her breakout role in Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” Lucas, meanwhile, had pivoted to auditioning adult actors for the role of Leia (seeing a number of soon-to-be stars, including Farrah Fawcett). Of course, he finally chose Carrie Fisher from the crowd, who had but one film credit to her name at the time.

It’s no secret that George Lucas was heavily inspired by the works of Akira Kurosawa when he was writing and directing “Star Wars.” As much as “Flash Gordon” serials and old Westerns, the samurai films of the Japanese auteur influenced his vision for this new world — to the extent that he could hardly imagine it without Kurosawa’s leading man, Toshiro Mifune.

Mifune had been a major Japanese film star throughout the ’40s and ’50s, most notably leading Kurosawa’s seminal works such as “Seven Samurai,” “Yojimbo,” and “The Hidden Fortress” (the last of which had the greatest influence on Lucas’ “Star Wars”). He made his Hollywood debut in the 1966 film “Grand Prix” and continued to act in the states throughout the remainder of his career. It isn’t hard at all to imagine what Mifune would’ve brought to the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who was clearly styled after the stoic samurai heroes Mifune had played previously. Lucas offered him Kenobi and Darth Vader — but Mifune allegedly wanted neither role.

According to his daughter (who spoke about the offer publicly in 2015, per The Guardian), Mifune was actually not impressed with how Lucas had been inspired by his films. “…[H]e was concerned about how the film would look and that it would cheapen the image of samurai, on which George Lucas had based a lot of the character and fighting style,” she said. Mifune went on to appear in Steven Spielberg’s “1941;” Lucas, meanwhile, turned to Alec Guinness, who earned a Best Supporting Actor nod from the Academy for his work.

“The Empire Strikes Back” has often been described as the most successful independent film ever made. Outside the purview of 20th Century Fox, George Lucas had been freed to take his “Star Wars” profits and risk them on an ambitious sequel. Understandably, he wanted no one but the best by his side, so when it came to bringing the new alien character to Yoda to life, Lucas immediately went to the master of puppets himself.

By the ’70s, Jim Henson was revolutionizing puppetry through “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show.” The production of “Empire” came at a pivotal time in his career, with the fifth and final season of “The Muppet Show” on the horizon and “The Muppet Movie” imminent in 1979. Lucas said in interviews after the fact that Henson was focused on an unnamed movie — if it wasn’t the aforementioned film, it could’ve easily been “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981) or “The Dark Crystal” (1982), the latter of which had been a long in-development passion project for Henson potentially poised to help launch his post-“Muppets” career. In any case, he was simply too focused on his own work to help Lucas with his — at least, not directly.

Henson pointed Lucas toward Frank Oz, a prolific (if less famous, at the time) puppeteer in his own right who had worked closely under Henson since the early days of the “Muppets” in the early ’60s. Oz was the man behind such characters as the Cookie Monster and Fozzie Bear, both of whom are subtly echoed by Oz’s performance as Yoda. In a very real way, despite his absence, Henson’s influence is nonetheless present in “Empire.”

The late Yaphet Kotto wasn’t too thrilled when his “Star Wars” opportunity came knocking. The “Live and Let Die” and “Alien” actor took a meeting with “Empire Strikes Back” director Irvin Kershner on the set of the latter film, during which he was offered the role of Lando Calrissian. Whether Kershner knew it at the time or not, Kotto (by his own account) still had something of a chip on his shoulder from being teased the role of Han Solo, only for George Lucas to go with Harrison Ford. When Kershner brought him Lando, he turned it down immediately and without a second thought.

Kotto’s decision to turn down “Empire” was two-fold. First and foremost, he had a prior commitment at the time — Stuart Rosenberg had cast him as the second-billed principal actor below Robert Redford in the 1980 prison drama “Brubaker,” an opportunity that was as enticing as it was validating for the rising star, given that he felt he’d been denied proper prominence on “Alien.” (In fact, the actor told Nerdist that his low-billing on “Alien” and his being passed over for Han Solo came down to racial discrimination.)

As the actor admitted, the “Brubaker” commitment was more a fortunately available excuse than it was the driving cause of his distaste for “Star Wars.” Kotto was well aware that “Alien” was a sci-fi blockbuster well-positioned to ride the wave started by Lucas in 1977 — if he appeared as a supporting character in back-to-back space features, he was sure he’d be typecast as a sci-fi actor for the remainder of his career.

The only actor who denied “Star Wars” as much contemporary star-power as Al Pacino is, without a doubt, 1990s Leonardo DiCaprio. By the time George Lucas brought “The Phantom Menace” to theaters in ’99, the future Oscar-winner had starred in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “The Basketball Diaries,” “Romeo + Juliet,” and James Cameron’s “Titanic.” DiCaprio was staring down the new millennium as its biggest rising star, a leading man whom studios wanted at the forefront of potentially lucrative blockbuster franchises – James Cameron very nearly had him webbed up for “Spider-Man.”

After “Phantom Menace” premiered to polarized critical reactions, Lucas sought DiCaprio for the role of Anakin Skywalker. It would’ve been a boon for “Star Wars” at a moment when the world was reeling from his surprising stumble back into theaters. He met with the filmmaker during the casting process for “Attack of the Clones,” saying over a decade afterward that he simply didn’t feel ready to “take that dive” (per Shortlist). 

The role went to Hayden Christensen, who had notably acted in Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” (produced by her father) in 1999. Christensen’s performance was divisive, and certainly seems the exact opposite of what DiCaprio would’ve done in the role, alternating between antisocial detachment and petulant rage. Whether or not that choice was right for the character is hotly debated among fans today — Christensen was praised for his work in 2003’s “Shattered Glass,” but Anakin remained the role that defined his career for better and for worse.

With that in mind, it could have just as easily been DiCaprio constrained by the reputation of the prequel trilogy. 2002 saw him star in both Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” and Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can,” cementing him as a prestige movie star who remains one of the most famous actors to almost appear in a “Star Wars” film.

There are plenty of stories out there about actors missing out on “Star Wars” because they couldn’t quite picture what it would become — Rooney Mara’s story is far more interesting because she declined a role in the franchise when it was arguably at its peak in terms of popularity, promise, and critical perception.

Mara rose to fame in the early 2010s — squarely in the post-prequel era of “Star Wars,” when the franchise was still nursing a mixed reputation among general audiences — through films like “The Social Network” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The latter film earned Mara her first Academy Award nomination. Afterward, “Star Wars” experienced a triumphant cultural resurgence during the lead-up to “The Force Awakens.” There was arguably no better window for an actor of Mara’s generation to get involved — and, in hindsight, no better project for an actor with her taste.

In early 2015, Mara met with director Gareth Edwards about playing Jyn Erso in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” While she attests that the meeting went well, she said she declined to even read the role because she was too busy with working on adult dramas like “Lion” and “Carol” (the latter of which earned her a second Oscar nom). By March, fellow Oscar-nominee Felicity Jones was announced as the star, leading what would be remembered as the closest thing to an adult drama the “Star Wars” franchise would release in theaters.

The most recent entry on this list is unfortunately the one we understand the least about, at least as of writing. Shortly after she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing the title role in Sean Baker’s drama “Anora,” it was widely reported that Mikey Madison had been offered a major role in the as-of-yet-upcoming film “Star Wars: Starfighter.” The standalone spin-off already had “Deadpool and Wolverine” director Shawn Levy attached to helm the project, with an ascendant Ryan Gosling slated to star.

The plot of the film (scheduled to hit theaters in 2027) has been mostly kept a secret, but Madison’s prospective character was speculated to be an antagonist chasing after Gosling’s character, who is reportedly protecting a young character played by “Wednesday” actor Flynn Gray. (It would be absolutely shocking if he turned out to be a Jedi, wouldn’t it? Uncharted territory for the franchise, for sure.)

Whatever kind of role Madison was offered, it was apparently unattractive for the young Oscar-winner. It thus went to Mia Goth, an actor with the same indie prestige whose on-screen presence is more villainous, given her work in horror films like “Pearl” and “Infinity Pool.” Madison will star as Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” sans Jessie Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg.