Charlie Sheen finally got the chance to confront Oliver Stone about being dropped from Born on the Fourth of July in favor of Tom Cruise, the actor revealed in a new interview.
Sheen opened up about the “betrayal” he felt at the time by the film’s director, Oliver Stone, on the In Depth With Graham Bensinger podcast. “The thing that was weird is he said, you know, ‘I want you to do Born on the Fourth,’ and we had meetings about it, and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic,” the real Vietnam War veteran the film is based on. “And then he just—I stopped hearing from him. We stopped talking about it,” Sheen ultimately found out Cruise had been attached to play Kovic instead, despite he and Stone’s “handshake” deal.
“We were far enough down the road to feel like this was our next thing” at the time, Sheen, who previously starred in Stone’s Platoon in 1986 recalled. “I signed a napkin,” he laughed. “My word was honored between us.”
Though he acknowledged that it’s “just a movie” and “you can’t lose something you never had,” Sheen admitted it was “a big deal” to lose out on the role. “It was also the betrayal factor of it,” he explained.
The 1989 war drama earned Cruise his first Oscar nod, Stone the Best Director statue, and six other nominations. Sheen admitted that in some ways, he saw the switcheroo coming.
“Oliver’s been a fan of Tom’s for a long time,” he said. When he and Stone were finally “drunk enough” together to talk about what happened, Stone told him why he chose Cruise for the film instead. “He was like, ‘I just felt like you didn’t have any passion for it. I felt like you lost interest.’ I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t see you. How do you know how much passion I lost or interest that evaporated if we never talked about it again?’”
“He was like, ‘Yeah, you know, my instincts told me that.’ The Oliver-isms, you know, he could just tell,” Sheen went on, gesturing that he has no hard feelings about it now. “It’s fine.”
“It’s a different movie if Tom does it than if I do it,” he explained. “When someone gets a job and does that with it,” he said, throwing his hands up in praise of Cruise’s performance, “You’re just like, of course. You don’t sit there and dissect it, like ‘I’d have done that better.’ No, go f— yourself. He should have won the freaking Oscar.” Ultimately Sheen believes it happened the way it was supposed to.
“I did some bad, just forgettable films sort of around that same time, although Major League was not one of them,” he said referencing the 1989 baseball comedy. “I don’t know if Major League happens if I do Born on the Fourth… I’m just pretty sure that one would have gotten in the way of the other.”
“People are going to research this and they’re going to find the timeline, they’re going to correct me, and I don’t care…“ he added, “and if it’s not true, that’s what I’m going with.”
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