Timothée as Spider-Man? 15 actors who narrowly avoided career-destroying roles

 Hollywood is a town built on flukes. Get hired for a role and you can become an overnight sensation. Get it wrong and your career can end in an instant.

But some of the most interesting Hollywood tales are the “what-might-have-beens” – the stories of when one minor twist of fate might have entirely changed the trajectory of somebody’s stardom.

Many of today’s A-list names – among them Margot Robbie, Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya – ended up at the top of Hollywood based on talent and perseverance. But they also benefited from sheer good fortune, with busted auditions or scheduling conflicts just some of the reasons they didn’t end up starring in potentially career-derailing parts.

Saoirse Ronan in Josh Trank’s disastrous 2015 Fantastic Four reboot? It could have happened!

We’ve already explored the roles that ruined careers, here are 15 roles that could have ruined careers if not for the guiding hand of Lady Luck…

Timothée Chalamet in Spider-Man: Homecoming

In 2022, the Dune actor revealed that Leonardo DiCaprio once offered him two pieces of advice: “No hard drugs and no superhero movies.” While we can’t possibly comment on whether Chalamet has abided by the first bit of wisdom, he’s successfully avoided the shackles of comic book films. That said, pre-DiCaprio chat, he did get close to the role of Peter Parker in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, screen-testing for a part that eventually went to Tom Holland. While Holland has by no means had a bad career outside of the MCU, the volume of Spider-Man and Avengers movies he’s made has meant he’s been contractually locked in to a franchise for much of his twenties. Chalamet, meanwhile, has had the freedom to bounce from auteur to auteur, cementing himself – as many have predicted – as the heir to Leo.

Margot Robbie in Ghost in the Shell

Based on the fact that she produced lucrative, inescapable conversation-starters including Barbie and Saltburn – and has gravitated towards filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson – Margot Robbie is undoubtedly very, very smart when it comes to navigating Hollywood. But she also had luck on her side from the beginning of her career. In the wake of her breakout role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, she turned down the April O’Neil role in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot (eventually filled by Megan Fox), the Invisible Woman role in the doomed 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four, and was aggressively pursued for the English-language take on the Japanese animated film Ghost in the Shell. In the end, Robbie chose to play Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad instead, while Ghost in the Shell bombed and trapped its eventual star Scarlett Johansson in a whitewashing controversy over the choice to cast a non-Asian actor in the leading role. What a lucky break!

Zendaya in Alita: Battle Angel

It remains surprising that, despite her outsized fame, Zendaya has only starred in eight live-action feature films – all of which, perhaps bar the pandemic-era curio Malcolm & Marie, have been smart choices at least on the business end. Whatever the creative failings of her Spider-Man movies or 2017’s The Greatest Showman, Zendaya is laughing her way to the bank. Plus it could have all gone wrong. In 2016, it was reported that the actor – then a buzzy up-and-comer famous for the Disney sitcom Shake It Up! – was “the frontrunner” for the starring role in Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi extravaganza Alita: Battle Angel, and that the only hiccup to her involvement may be scheduling conflicts with that aforementioned Disney show. Whatever happened behind the scenes, Zendaya dropped out of contention and Rosa Salazar was hired to play Alita. The film made money and has – hi, Alita stans! – a very, very passionate fanbase to this day, but it is questionable whether it would have done anything positive for Zendaya’s career.

Charlize Theron in Showgirls

Paul Verhoeven’s trashy epic Showgirls was meant to turn its leading lady into a star – but as Elizabeth Berkley learned, the abysmal response to its initial release was planted firmly (if unfairly) at her feet. What luck, then, that the part of erratic, pocket-knife-wielding exotic dancer Nomi Malone didn’t go to a young, unknown actor named Charlize Theron. In 2015, Verhoeven revealed that the future Oscar winner had auditioned. “I don’t recall her having any problem with the nudity at all,” he said. “She was good and wanted the part, but basically she was not well known enough at the time and just did not fit the part, so we said no.” In reference to the jeers Berkley received, Verhoeven added that Theron should be grateful for not getting Nomi: “It would have been a miserable 20 years for her!”

Haley Lu Richardson in Batgirl

The White Lotus star has been on the cusp of a major breakout for several years now, and fought hard to play Batgirl in a major DC Comics movie alongside Brendan Fraser and Michael Keaton. “I really tried, let me tell you,” she said in 2022. “But I’m not Batgirl at the end of the day.” Instead, In the Heights star Leslie Grace was cast in the role. That wasn’t the end of the story, however. The $100m (£88.7m) Batgirl movie finished filming but was then abruptly shelved, locked away in a vault as part of a tax-savings effort. It’s likely never to be seen. Later, Richardson spoke to The Independent about her lucky escape: “I felt really bad for all those people that made that movie. I know what it’s like to put your heart into something, and something that’s that big and that much money and that much energy and that big of a crew, like, that’s so crazy that you can just scrap that. That’s so extreme.”