Melissa McCarthy was perfectly cast in Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” an Oscar-nominated role that also happened to be the best performance of her career. In the film she played biographer Lee Israel, who had a knack for forging celeb letters in the early ‘90s.
The film was originally to be directed by talented writer-director Nicole Holofcener (“Lovely and Amazing”), who wrote the screenplay and was slated to direct Julianne Moore in the lead role. That version fell apart due to “creative differences. Moore finally detailed the painful process of being fired from the film, in a new interview on Watch What Happens Live.
“I didn’t leave that movie, I was fired,” the Oscar winner said. “Yeah, yeah, Nicole fired me.”
Moore says Holofcener “didn’t like what I was doing” during rehearsals for the film. Moore said of Holofcener. “I think that her idea of where the character was was different from my idea of where the character was, and so she fired me.” In an interview with Indiewire, she added that she “didn’t want to leave.” adding that it’s “still kind of painful,” Moore told Watch What Happens Live that she still hasn’t seen the McCarthy movie.
An actress as esteemed and commendable as the legendary Moore being fired from a movie is almost unthinkable, but it happened.
Watch her interview below.