After Charlie Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men back in 2011, series creator Chuck Lorre made the interesting decision to keep the show going with a new lead character. Naturally, with such big shoes to fill, some equally huge names were thrown around as possible replacements for Sheen. Rob Lowe and John Stamos were rumored to have been approached, but were never actually in the running. And though he wasn’t really a contender at any point, Jason Alexander jokingly pitched himself to CBS by saying he’d “commence using cocaine in quantities large enough to challenge the national output of Columbia.”
Hugh Grant, on the other hand, was under serious consideration to star and even flew in to discuss the opportunity with Warner Bros. executives a couple of times. A few years later, Grant opened up to Howard Stern about why he stepped away from the supposedly “stratospheric” payday at the last minute.
As he tells it, the problem was that the producers didn’t have any clear plan for how things would play out with his character. In fact, Grant says they expected him to sign on before they’d bothered to come up with a character for him to play.
Hugh Grant Turned Down a ‘Stratospheric’ Payday to Replace Charlie Sheen on ‘Two and a Half Men’
“I said, ‘Well, you’re obviously brilliantly talented.’ Cuz I like that show. And they make brilliant TV shows, really,” Grant told Stern. “But I said, ‘I’m too scared to sign up without a script.’” Within days of his decision, Ashton Kutcher was announced as Sheen’s replacement. While Grant admitted to watching the revamped show out of curiosity, he wasn’t regretful over turning down the gig because he doesn’t think Kutcher’s character was anything like what they would’ve created for him.
With Grant’s involvement, the series was projected to last as many as four additional seasons. Though Kutcher did manage to carry the show through four more seasons himself, the final season was shorter than the others. And despite Kutcher’s debut pulling in big numbers, the ratings hit record lows during his tenure. Yet and still, Kutcher remained the highest-paid actor on TV for his entire run; a distinction that obviously would’ve gone to Grant under different circumstances.
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