Charlie Sheen recently appeared on “In Depth With Graham Bensinger” and reflected on being dropped from 1989’s “Born on the Fourth of July” so that it could become a Tom Cruise star vehicle. Sheen said he had been in talks with his “Platoon” director Oliver Stone about reuniting on the movie, which tells the true story of Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic and how he became an anti-war advocate after being paralyzed in battle. Sheen had no idea Stone was changing course until Sheen’s brother, Emilio Estevez, cold-called him one night.
“Emilio, he calls me. He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right?” Sheen said (via EW). “I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?” He says, ‘Cruise is doing “Born on the Fourth.”‘ I love that Emilio thought that I needed to be seated to get news he thought was going to make me faint. I mean, what are we doing here? It’s a movie.”
Even if it’s just a movie, Sheen acknowledged being dropped for Cruise was “a big deal,” adding: “It was also the betrayal factor of it. So I was like, ‘OK, all right.’ You know, Oliver’s been a fan of Tom’s for a long time. It’s a different movie if Tom does it than if I do it.”
Sheen said the news of Cruise’s casting came after he “had meetings about” the movie with Stone, with the duo even having dinner with the real Ron Kovic. “And then I stopped hearing from him,” Sheen said of Stone. “We stopped talking about it, and I reach out to Oliver, and I’m told that he’s in Cuba. Whatever. This is like 1988 or ’89, right? I’m like, ‘OK, well, tell him I’m looking for him.’”
It wasn’t until much later that Sheen got the chance to confront Stone about the betrayal when they both ended up in the same bar, explaining: “I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up. And he was like, ‘I just felt like you didn’t have any passion for it. I felt like you lost interest.’ I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t see you. How do you know how much passion I lost or interest that evaporated if we never talked about it again?’”
Sheen is no longer bitter about how things went down, noting: “You can’t lose something you never had. I didn’t sign a contract. There was a handshake.” And he’s not one to talk negatively about Cruise, who scored the first Oscar nomination of his career for “Born on the Fourth of July.”
“It wasn’t like a thing where I’m going to talk shit about him, because then you see the movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, OK. All right. He turned it into that,’” Sheen said. “When someone gets a job and does that with it, you’re just like, of course. You don’t sit there and dissect it and like, ‘I’d have done that better.’ No, go fuck yourself. That’s a brilliant [performance] — and you should have won the freaking Oscar.”
Cruise’s Oscar nom was one of eight Academy Award nominations earned by “Born on the Fourth of July.” The film was also nominated for best picture and won Stone the best director prize. The movie was a box office hit with $162 million worldwide.
Watch Sheen’s full interview on the “In Depth With Graham Bensinger” podcast in the video below.
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