Tom Cruise rejected the role of “Edward Scissorhands,” Michael Jackson wanted it and Johnny Depp ended up getting it.
Tim Burton, the star director of the moment, was the one who defined a successful leading role to play “Edward Scissorhands.” He knows the unusual reason why Tom Cruise rejected the role that Johny Depp later got.
It was precisely in the winter of 1989 that Johnny Depp was in Vancouver filming a television show. At that time, the actor was experiencing a very difficult situation and even worked without effort or desire. Faced with such a dilemma that he was facing, a stroke of luck came to him and this was his first film.
Without a project to help him wake up from that work lethargy, an ordinary day turned into a good day when his agent sent him a script to read. It was the story of a boy with scissors instead of hands, called Edward Scissorhands.
Johnny Depp intrigued, began to read. From the third page, he felt great happiness that caught him before an extraordinary story. When he reached the final page he found him crying: “like a newborn and unable to believe that there was someone so brilliant as to have written something like that,” he once confessed.
Delighted and with great enthusiasm, he began the project to work on the role to be Edward: “I was one of those youthful television actors. No director in his right mind would hire me for such a leading role."
Although the script for the movie Scissorhands was definitely different from any other, director Tim Burton knew that success would depend on the actor he chose for the lead role, and Johnny Depp was the ideal one.
However, while Jonny Depp was very excited and willing to work in his new role, he had been told that other famous artists, including Michael Jackson, had also been considered for the character.
He even found out that they had previously sent it to Tom Cruise, but the handsome actor, who was just starting to make his mark, responded that he would only agree to do it "as long as in the end the hero grows hands and becomes cute." That was the unusual reason why Tom Cruise turned down the role of Edward Scissorhands.
Faced with all that competition, Johnny Depp resigned himself to the thought that they would finally call him and that was it. That role may not have meant an advance in his career, but it was freedom at that moment to create, experiment, learn, and exorcise something that he carried deep within him.
