Nothing bonds two actors fairly like an audition that goes awry, say Robert Downey Jr. and Jimmy Fallon. Throughout a latest look on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Present, the pair recalled the time they tried—and failed—to safe roles in Nancy Meyers’s 2006 romantic comedy, The Vacation.
The movie, which has change into one thing of a basic within the Christmas season rom-com style, facilities on two girls—film trailer maker Amanda (Cameron Diaz) and author Iris (Kate Winslet)—who commerce houses and every discover love of their new environments through the vacation season. “We each acquired referred to as in simply as seat fillers and we noticed one another,” Downey stated of his and Fallon’s auditions. “Jack Black is getting his half and Jude Regulation is certainly getting my half, however she wanted somebody to learn with the gals”—“she,” presumably, being Meyers. “And we’re sitting there going, ‘It’s about to occur for us.’”
Whereas Downey had his doubts about whether or not he may wrangle the function away from Regulation, Fallon remembered pondering, “If Jack Black says no to this film, I’m so in. I’ll do it for half his value.” Sadly, their hopes of getting forged have been quickly crushed. “I used to be like, I’ve gotta have a greater English accent than Jude Regulation at this level,” Downey joked. Then “Winslet stated, ‘That’s the worst British accent I’ve ever heard,’ and I used to be like, ‘I’ll take a look at now, however I’m taking the gummy bears from the [hotel] mini bar.”
Fallon, not less than, was impressed by Downey’s tryout. “Truthfully, I’ll inform you by far, undoubtedly—I’m sitting throughout from Robert Downey Jr., and I’m going, ‘That is the perfect actor I’ve ever sat throughout and did a scene with in my complete life. It was mind-blowing for me,” he stated on the podcast. “I stop the enterprise. I by no means went again. That was the final time I auditioned for a job.” The Tonight Present host has spoken beforehand about his exodus from the movie business. “I acquired two pictures at main films,” he informed Vainness Honest in 2014, referencing 2004’s Taxi with Queen Latifah and 2005’s Fever Pitch reverse Drew Barrymore. “They didn’t open. Nothing you might do. It simply didn’t work.”
As a substitute of The Vacation, Downey would go on to make 2006’s The Shaggy Canine, a film he just lately declared certainly one of his profession’s “most necessary movies”—as a result of that was the challenge “that acquired Disney saying they’d insure me” for movies like Iron Man, he just lately informed The New York Instances Journal.
When breaking the information that they weren’t forged, Meyers stored it brief and candy, in accordance with Downey. “It’s simply, this was nice,” she purportedly stated. “It’s simply not an ideal match. Not an ideal match.”
