When George Lucas got Han Solo wrong
(Or How To Crash The Multiverse)
Close your eyes.
Imagine your favourite character from your favourite film.
Got it? Good.
Now, replace them in your mind, with a contemporary of theirs. How does the film look? How does it play out? Better? Worse?
It’s worse, isn’t it? Much worse?
The jokes don’t land. The drama doesn’t hit. It just feels off.
I remember the first time I heard the story that Eric Stoltz was the original Marty McFly in Back To The Future. And that the vibe was off because he brought a method acting intensity to the role. He bruised Thomas F. Wilson’s collarbones, such was the realism he injected into their push and shove scenes.
Really? Keith, the artist from Some Kind Of Wonderful bullied Biff Tannen? No wonder he made like a tree and got out of there.
So Michael J. Fox was hired and the rest is history. Or is it…the future?
No, it’s history. Time-travel doesn’t exist.
And there are lots of these stories…
Sylvester Stallone was lined up to play Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop. Michael Madsen was all set to be Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction. Tom Selleck passed an audition and would have been Indiana Jones, if it wasn’t for CBS holding him to his Magnum contract.
God bless you, CBS.
It’s unfathomable to think of anyone playing Indiana Jones other than the inimitable Harrison Ford. But what if we back up a step or two?
Ford was offered Indiana Jones off the back of playing Han Solo in Star Wars.
And, according to internet lore, Selleck was under consideration for Solo too.
Can you imagine Han Solo with the easy-going charm of Magnum P.I instead of Ford’s cynical mercenary swagger?
Suddenly he’s a little less dangerous. Less scrappy. Much less cool.
Once Solo changes, everything downstream starts changing too. The magic begins to evaporate…
Selleck wasn’t the sole Solo alternative either.
There was Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Sylvester Stallone, Nick Nolte, Kurt Russell, Robert Englund.
Robert Englund as Han Solo? In your dreams!
Our brains treat movie history like embedded cultural fact. Which it is. It’s immutable.
But what if it wasn’t?
The movies we grew up with and quote daily were only ever a bad casting decision away from becoming something else entirely.
Take Ford out of Star Wars, and watch the cultural butterfly effect shift all the way from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, the Jack Ryan movies and the Fugitive to the Academy Award-dodging Cowboys and Aliens and Expendables 3.
Maybe without Star Wars, Ford goes back to drinking from the cup of a carpenter as part of his day job, not just to save his dad from a gunshot wound.
One role. One audition. One decision.
A hair’s width away from entire cornerstones of popular culture shifting half a degree off.
In a universe of infinite possibilities, surely all of these casting decisions and more would have happened somewhere!
What if they did happen? What if they caused cultural cataclysms?
And what if this was the explanation for the A-Z of Movie Deaths and why Seth Stanley keeps appearing in them?
What if the A-Z is Seth’s attempt to save the multiverse?
It’s crazy how one casting choice can completely change the feel of a movie and everything that came after it
Thank you for reading!