Hollywood etiquette dictates that when a Hollywood star passes on a role, they don’t talk about it. To do so wouldn’t be fair on the actor who eventually took the role, since this would doom them to an indefinite future of potentially invidious comparisons.
There are exceptions, of course. Matt Damon tells a nice story about how he didn’t want to star in Avatar, largely out of faux bitterness at the payday he missed out on. Brad Pitt, too, will admit that he turned down the role of Neo in The Matrix, but this is famously the only instance he’ll name. The other exception, of course, is Rachel McAdams. This is because Rachel McAdams will happily tell everyone all about the weird two years in her life where she basically turned down every great role going.
In total, McAdams passed on five films between 2006 and 2008. All of them were huge, and all of them would have definitely altered the trajectory of her career. The films she turned down were Casino Royale, Iron Man, The Devil Wears Prada, Mission: Impossible III and Get Smart.
In a new Bustle profile, McAdams looks back on her lost years with a mixture of regret and healthy perspective. “I felt guilty for not capitalising on the opportunity that I was being given, because I knew I was in such a lucky spot,” She said. “But I also knew it wasn’t quite jiving with my personality and what I needed to stay sane. There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away.”
But should she regret turning down those roles? Almost certainly not. We can ditch Get Smart from the equation immediately, because it was a bad film that nobody remembers anyway. In Mission: Impossible III, she would have presumably played the role that eventually went to Michelle Monaghan (purely because everyone gets them confused). But Monaghan’s role wasn’t particularly exciting, and now involves her showing up in subsequent Mission: Impossible films to do almost nothing at all, so this was arguably a dodged bullet.
Casino Royale and The Devil Wears Prada can also be written off, on the basis that they eventually found their perfect actors anyway. Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd had a cold aloofness to her that almost no other actor could touch, and Anne Hathaway’s almost superhuman desire to be liked by everyone she meets made her the ideal foil for Meryl Streep in Prada.
This just leaves Iron Man. And you know what? She probably made the right choice there too. If she had played Pepper Potts, there would have been a 14-year age difference between her and Robert Downey Jr, which is almost double the difference between Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow. But she might have taken another role, such as the one eventually played by Leslie Bibb. And that would have been worse, because who remembers that Leslie Bibb was in Iron Man? In fact, the only negative thing about Rachel McAdams turning down Iron Man is that it kept her available to star in the mediocre Doctor Strange movies, in which she was criminally wasted.
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Obviously, however, turning down all these roles had an impact on her career. When she returned from her break, she spent a few years trying to find her place with a slew of thankless love interest roles. She was Channing Tatum’s love interest in The Vow. She played Domhnall Gleeson’s love interest in About Time. She only got to play Jake Gyllenhaal’s love interest for a part of Southpaw, because her character died to act as motivation for his character. Things got so bad for McAdams that she even took a role in the worst season of True Detective.
But ask yourself this. If Rachel McAdams had been a Bond girl, would she have had the sort of career that eventually led her to 2018’s Game Night? No, of course not, because she would have struggled to escape the 007 typecasting and just bumbled through a lot of witless dramas for the rest of her life. And that would have been a tragedy because, as everybody knows, Rachel McAdams in Game Night is better than any actor in anything ever. It was the part she was born to play. It might be fun to try and imagine what Iron Man would be like with Rachel McAdams as Pepper Potts, but it is genuinely impossible to imagine what the entire world would be like had Rachel McAdams not played Annie in Game Night. Whatever regrets she might have about her choices in the past, the fact that they led her to Game Night is proof that the universe is in perfect working order.