You can’t improve on perfection supposedly but adding Heath Ledger to your film’s cast would be a good way to try.
It turns out that the Aussie icon was all set to feature in 2007’s No Country for Old Men. No, not as the villainous Anton Chigurh – it’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Javier Bardem in that role now – but as Llewelyn Moss, eventually ably played by Josh Brolin.
Brolin dropped the bombshell during a recent appearance on Dax Sheppard’s Armchair Expert and Ledger not being in the Coen Brothers classic was for an unexpected reason. “I know they were really frustrated and they were looking everywhere,” he told the host.
“I don’t know if you knew this, but Heath Ledger was supposed to do that role. It wasn’t that he died, he pulled out of the role. He was like, ‘I don’t want to work right now.'”
It’s a classic cinema ‘what if’: for Ledger, No Country for Old Men coming between Brokeback Mountain (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008) would have been one of the best film runs in history; for Brolin, the neo-western turned into a massive breakout role for him.
It almost proved disastrous for the actor, however, as he broke his arm after a motorcycle collision just days after being cast. “Two days later, I was riding my motorcycle, I tee-boned a car, and I was flying in the air thinking, ‘Holy shit, I really wanted to work with the Coen brothers,” he recalled. Brolin bravely continued production with his arm in a sling and the rest is history.
Brolin was on Sheppard’s podcast to promote his new show, Outer Range, which premiered on Amazon Prime last month. A neo-western like No Country for Old Men, it also incorporates sci-fi and mystery elements in the tale of a rancher who discovers a strange black void in a pasture.
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Check out Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men:
