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Before he was Odysseus struggling to get home and Jason Bourne trying to understand his identity, Matt Damon was a jobbing actor trying to find his big break.
Yet, Matt Damon turned down the chance to appear in a Sam Raimi-directed Western starring Gene Hackman and Russell Crowe. The young actor decided that The Quick and the Dead wasn't the career trajectory he wanted.
In 1995, before his Oscar win for co-writingGood Will Hunting, Damon had appeared in Walter Hill's 1993 historical Western Geronimo: An American Legend, which also starred Hackman and Robert Duvall.
According to Slash Film, Tri-Star offered Damon $250,000 to appear in Raimi's Western, but he was not interested. "I want the kind of career Robert Duvall has. I don't feel [that] chasing movies like this is going to lead to a 40-year career. I'd rather be broke," Damon boldly claimed.
Ironically, the actor who took on the role became as big a star as Damon, possibly more so. Leonardo DiCaprio took on the role of Fee "The Kid" Herod after the Interstellar actor passed. The young boy is convinced that the sadistic mayor, played by Gene Hackman, is his father.
According to The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi, Sam Rockwell also auditioned for the role of The Kid. DiCaprio and Damon would later go on to star in Martin Scorsese's 2006 crime thriller The Departed together.
“This kid named Leonardo DiCaprio was the only one who nailed the audition, in my opinion: he was the only one who came in and cried, begging his father to love him as he died in the scene,” Sharon Stone wrote, per Perisphere. “The studio said if I wanted him so much, I could pay him out of my own salary. So I did.”
The Quick and the Dead took the classic Sergio Leone Western genre and turned it on its head, having Sharon Stone as the gunslinger. When she arrives at the town of Redemption in 1881, she finds it under the control of an evil mayor.
Despite Damon's reservations, The Quick and the Dead made $47.2 million on a $32 million budget. While it wasn't a massive hit at the time, it has become a cult classic, mainly thanks to its memorable final shootout.
Related: Matt Damon Knows His 2016 Film Is Bad, and So Does His Daughter
