I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Julianne Moore would have been a miscast if she wouldn’t have been fired and played Lee Israel in “Can You Ever Forgive Me.”
Melissa McCarthy was perfectly cast in Marielle Heller’s film, an Oscar-nominated role that also happened to be the best performance of her career. In the film she played biographer 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 Moore in the lead role. That version fell apart due to “creative differences. Moore had 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 hadn’t gone too into detail about her demise but did mention that 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 and today more details were revealed as to why it happened.
According to the film’s co-star Richard E. Grant (via Daily Mail), Moore wanted to wear a fat suit and a prosthetic nose in order to physically match Israel. Holofcener heavily objected and thus the decision to fire Moore was made.
Edward Berger seems to have settled on what comes next. His Lance Armstrong biopic, starring Austin Butler, is now holding casting calls, with production eyed for January.