Director reveals A-list actors who turned down ‘Brokeback Mountain’

GROUNDBREAKING gay love story Brokeback Mountain earned rave reviews for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal — but two much bigger stars had already turned it down.

ANG Lee’s acclaimed 2005 film Brokeback Mountain was carried by electric performances by its two young lead actors — but it could’ve been a very different movie.

Director Gus Van Sant, who was approached to direct the film before Lee, has revealed that the two lead parts were initially offered to an array of Hollywood’s biggest male stars — all of whom passed on the show.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger played Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, two sheep herders in remote rural America in the 1960s who have to hide their romantic relationship from the world. The film was hailed as a groundbreaking portrayal of same-sex love, and won three Academy Awards from eight nominations.

Heath Ledger (L) and Jake Gyllenhaal had incredible chemistry in Brokeback Mountain.

But back in the late 90s when the film was just a script knocking around Hollywood, “nobody wanted to do it,” Van Sant revealed in an interview with IndieWire.

“I was working on it, and I felt like we needed a really strong cast, like a famous cast. That wasn’t working out. I asked the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Ryan Phillippe. They all said no.”

Brokeback Mountain producer and screenwriter Diana Ossana confirmed to IndieWire that all those actors had turned down the film, “for various reasons.”

Earlier reports also added Joaquin Phoenix’s name to the list of actors Van Sant had approached to star in the film, which is based on a 1997 short story by author Annie Proulx.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 2007, Damon nominated Brokeback Mountain as one movie he wished he hadn’t turned down.

Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley.

Leo DiCaprio turned the film down. Picture: C Flanigan/FilmMagic

“Years ago, Gus Van Sant wanted to do it with me and Joaquin Phoenix. But I was on my way to Italy to do The Talented Mr. Ripley and then All the Pretty Horses. And Gus wanted to do Brokeback right after. And I was like, ‘Gus, I’m going to do a gay movie, then a cowboy movie. I can’t follow it up with a gay-cowboy movie!’’’

Interestingly, while the film was a critical and commercial success, Proulx later said she wished she’d never written the short story upon which it was based.

The author explained that ever since penning the story, she’d been inundated with fan fiction from amateur authors seeking to rewrite its sad ending, describing the deluge as “the source of constant irritation in my private life.”

“They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for ‘fixing’ the story,” she told the Wall Street Journal in 2008.

“Nearly all of these remedial writers are men, and most of them begin, ‘I’m not gay, but …’ They do not understand the original story, they know nothing of copyright infringement — that the characters Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are my intellectual property — and, beneath every mangled rewrite is the unspoken assumption that because they are men they can write this story better than a woman can.”

Annie Proulx says Brokeback Mountain has become a “constant source of irritation.”