Donald Sutherland Was Denied a Role in 'Flashdance,' But Charmed His Way Into 'The Hunger Games'

There are endless alternate realities in Hollywood, in which different actors take iconic roles and create intriguing new wrinkles in the pop-culture universe.

Here’s one of the more bizarre (and delightful) road-not-taken: Donald Sutherland in the movie Flashdance.

“You know, after Ordinary People, I couldn’t get an audition for a year,” the acting legend tells GQ in a new interview. “There was one film that I wanted… I think it was Flashdance? And the producer said to Ronny [his then agent, Ron Meyer], ‘You would have a better chance getting the part than he would.’”

Seems like a harsh thing to say to a guy who had recently starred in an Oscar-winning film, and headlined some of the biggest flicks of the 70’s, but then again, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie did make $201 million in 1983, so you can’t fault them for picking Michael Nouri for the role of steel-mill owner Nick.

Three decades later, Sutherland was more successful in campaigning for a role, writing his way into the Hunger Games series as the nefarious President Snow.

"Nobody asked me to do it. I wasn’t offered it. I like to read scripts, and it captured my passion,” he told the magazine. “I wrote them a letter. The role of the president had maybe a line in the script. Maybe two. Didn’t make any difference. I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be a part of it. I thought it could wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s. I hadn’t read the books. To be truthful, I was unaware of them. But they showed my letter to the director, Gary Ross, and he thought it’d be a good idea if I did it. He wrote those wonderfully poetic scenes in the rose garden, and they formed the mind and wit of Coriolanus Snow.”

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 opens in theaters nationwide on November 21

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