Penny Marshall’s Big, released in 1988, tells the story of a young boy named Josh Baskin, who makes a wish at a fortune-telling machine that transforms him into an adult overnight. The now-grown Josh (played by Tom Hanks) is unable to convince his mother of what happened or locate the magic machine, so he heads to New York City, where he gets a job working for a toy company. He starts rising in the ranks and falls in love with his co-worker, Susan (Elizabeth Perkins), but the pressures of adulthood start to overwhelm him. When a friend tells him where to find the machine responsible for his situation, Josh ultimately decides to leave his new life behind and go back to being a kid again.
The film was a major hit for Hanks and helped establish him as a box-office draw, but he was far from the first choice for the lead role. Several people turned down the part, but as Elizabeth Perkins told Andy Cohen in 2021, Robert De Niro had already been cast as the adult version of Josh before Hanks’s involvement. “It’s like a totally different movie in my brain with Robert De Niro,” Perkins admitted. When asked what De Niro’s take on the character was like, she said, “He was more moody. It was…a little bit of a horror movie. It was Robert De Niro wandering around the streets of New York.”
Perkins auditioned for the movie with De Niro, but a scheduling conflict forced him to drop out. Or, as De Niro explained to Jimmy Fallon that same year, “We had a thing, an issue with the…negotiation…so it went the way it went.” Perkins wasn’t the only actress to audition with him, however. During a 2018 interview with The Canadian Press, the late Catherine O’Hara revealed that she and De Niro also auditioned for director Penny Marshall, whom she described as “great and supportive and fun.”
O’Hara went on to say, “That was an odd little fun experience. It’s like at SCTV where we would do the stage version of a movie and cast it. That was the most fun, was miscasting things. Not to say that Robert De Niro doing Big would be miscast, it would just be a different movie. But it’s always fun to imagine other people playing those iconic roles.”
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