Richard E. Grant Says That Julianne Moore Got Fired From “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” For Wanting To Wear A Fat Suit And Rubber Nose
Recently, Julianne Moore appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen and admitted that she’d been fired from Can You Ever Forgive Me?. That’s the movie starring Melissa McCarthy as real-life literary scammer Lee Israel. Melissa was nominated for Best Actress by both The Academy and BAFTA, and the movie was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay respectively. Julianne didn’t say why she got fired, only that the director at the time didn’t like the direction she was going with the character. It was the only time Julianne’s ever been fired from a movie and she was clearly still butt-hurt over it. She even said she couldn’t bring herself to watch it, though made sure to praise Melissa with a perfunctory verbal air kiss.
Here’s Julianne talking about the one that got away.
Thank god Melissa’s co-star Richard E Grant isn’t afraid of redheads like he should be. He got to flapping his lips at an Advertising Week Europe event and tattled on Julianne. Turns out she was fired because she wanted to one-up her The Hours co-star Nicole Kidman by wearing a rubber nose AND a fat suit. Yeah, the thirst was real.
Richard probably didn’t mean to highlight Julianne’s Oscar lust by outing her, but you can’t argue with the results. Richard was talking about previous iterations of the project. Originally it was supposed to star Helena Bonham Carter as Lee and Sam Rockwell as Richard’s character Jack Hock. According to The Independent:
“Fast forward 10 years and then it was going to be Julianne Moore and Chris O’Dowd and then Nicole Holofcener, the co-screenwriter, fired Julianne Moore two days before they started shooting over creative differences and then Melissa McCarthy’s husband, who had been in the previous version and still played the same part, gave her the script to read and then she came on board and then I got cast so it was third time lucky for me otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
Asked later what creative differences means, he said: “Julianne Moore wanted to wear a fat suit and a false nose to play Lee Israel and Nicole Holofcener said ‘you’re not going to do that’.”
For reference, here is the real Lee Israel.
Of course, Melissa doesn’t look anything like her either, but at the very least, she didn’t need to bury herself under 50 pounds of silicone to be believable as a zaftig, down-on-her-luck schlub. We can’t have skinny minnies stealing all the good roles! Julianne even tried to snatch an Oscar out of Emma Stone’s hands.
Julianne needs to slow her motherfucking roll. She’s coming after other redheads now!
Pic: Wenn.com