‘It was the betrayal factor’

Charlie Sheen still remembers the moment he learned that he wouldn’t star in Born on the Fourth of July.

At the time, he was best known for his work in movies such as director Oliver StoneS ‘ Platoon and Wall Street. But, as he’s said before, he thought he and Stone had agreed that he would star in Stone’s 1989 movie about Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic.

And yet it was Tom Cruise who ended up earning an Oscar nomination for his turn.

Sheen’s brother Emilio Estevez was the one who delivered the bad news.

“Emilio, he calls me. He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right?” Sheen said on Thursday’s edition of In Depth with Graham Bensinger. “I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?’ He says, ‘Cruise is doing Born on the Fourth.’”

Sheen was familiar with Cruise, who moved in the same circle of young, up-and-coming actors. Among other things, Estevez and Cruise had costarred in the 1983 movie The Outsidersand Cruise had even stayed at the family’s home for a while when he first arrived in Los Angeles.

“I love that Emilio thought that I needed to be seated to get news he thought was going to make me faint,” Sheen said. “I mean, what are we doing here? It’s a movie.”

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A major movie, though.

“It’s a big deal,” Sheen acknowledged. “Well, 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 Stone had previously been clear about wanting him to play the part.

“We had meetings about it, and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic. And then I stopped hearing from him,” Sheen said of Stone on the podcast. “We stopped talking about it, and I reached 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.’”

For Sheen, losing touch with the project was a bummer, but one he could overcome.

“You can’t lose something you never had,” he said Two and a Half Men alum said. “I didn’t sign a contract. There was a handshake.”

There was one instance in which Sheen confronted Stone in a bar about what had gone down.

“I stopped in and he was there, and I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up,” Sheen said. “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?’”

Despite all that happened, Sheen couldn’t help but be impressed by Cruise’s work.

“It wasn’t like a thing where I’m going to talk s— 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 f— yourself. That’s a brilliant — and you should have won the freaking Oscar.”

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to reps for Stone.

Besides, Sheen said he would have missed out on one of his own big movies.

“I don’t know if Major League happens if I want Born on the Fourth,” he said. “I’m just pretty sure that one would have gotten in the way of the other, and if it’s not true, that’s what I’m going with.”

Hear the full conversation above.

The broadcast episode featuring Sheen debuts in broadcast syndication across the US this weekend on In Depth with Graham Bensinger.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly