It is considered bad form among actors to talk about roles you've turned down, but such info does come out from time to time. As for regrets, I think few have the personality or ego to admit such things very often, at least publicly. Also many of these rumors are based on things as tenuous as studio notes. The name of a popular actor of an era being on a wishlist for a role is rather standard. From the mid 1980s up through the 1990s, for example, it's hard to imagine any major or minor script in town where an attempt wasn't made to get it into the hands of Tom Cruise and/or Tom Hanks. To imply then that because another actor later appeared in it means that Cruise or another megastar "turned it down" is misleading. That a studio or director wants a big star is no shocker. It's only cases where they've had specific meetings on it, started talking contracts and schedules and money, that is when you can say they turned something down. Of course Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds would have been on lists as possibles for James Bond or just about any action-related project of the 1970s. They were the big box office action champs of the day. And going back further, when the actors were all under contract to the various Studios, obviously every actor in the stable was potentially attatched to everything. That's where legends like Ronald Regan was going to be Rick in
Casablanca come from. Reagan was never offered it, but when it was in various stages and going to be handled as a B-movie, clearly one of WB's B actors, like Reagan, would have gotten the role. But it's not as if they started filming and three days in decided, woah, we better get Bogie.
As for some famous ones that have actually been confirmed and were not just rumors or pie-in-the-sky wishes for some producer...
Alec Baldwin has admitted that career-wise it was an error to opt out of appearing in the Jack Ryan sequels, but he did so to work on Broadway in
A Streetcar Named Desire and other productions, so he doesn't "regret" that decision. Certainly he acknowledges with hindsight that his film career would have likely been better in the early '90s and possibly beyond had he stayed with the franchise, but regret is the wrong word. He's happy to have done the stage work.
One star who
has admitted regret on a role he infamously turned down is Burt Reynolds, for the role of ex-Astronaut Garrett Breedlove in the multiple Oscar winner
Terms of Endearment. Reynolds had starred in the first screenplay of James L. Brooks' that made it to the screen,
Starting Over, and Brooks wrote the part in
Terms thinking of Reynolds all the while. When it came time to film it, Burt decided instead to make the would-be comedy
Stroker Ace, set in the world of NASCAR with his then-girlfriend and wife-to-be Loni Anderson and buddy Jim Nabors. Whether or not Reynolds would have won the Supporting Actor Oscar that Jack Nicholson did in the role no one can say, but it certainly could have changed his career trajectory, being a well-written humorous role where he was actually playing his age and stripping away his vanity instead of hopelessly clinging onto his persona from
Smokey & the Bandit in ever-increasingly ridiculous hairpieces and a paunch that could no longer be hidden. It would have made directors and casting agents think of him in a different way that may well have led to better, more important pictures in the 1980s. Instead his career took a very steep dive, going from perennial box office star to an industry punchline and box office poison over the rest of the decade. I'm sure the fact that the Burt & Loni marriage ended in one of the nastiest divorces in Hollywood history also adds to the regret. But if he had it to do over again, Reynolds has said he would most definitely have done anything and everything in his power to be a part of
Terms of Endearment. Well...duh.
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