All the Actors Who Turned Down Brokeback Mountain
“I was working on it, and I felt like we needed a really strong cast, like a famous cast,” Van Sant told Indiewire in 2018. “That wasn’t working out. I asked the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Ryan Phillippe. They all said no.”
In hindsight, he wasn’t sure why he was so stuck on casting big stars, concluding he was “not ready” to helm the movie at the time.
“There was something off with myself, I guess,” he said, “whatever was going on.”
Mark Wahlberg later had a meeting with Lee, but told WENN in 2007, per the Advocate, that he got “a little creeped out” by the 15 pages of the script that he read.
“I told Ang Lee, ‘I like you, you’re a talented guy, if you want to talk about it more…'” he recalled. “Thankfully, he didn’t…I didn’t rush to see Brokeback, it’s just not my deal… Obviously, it was done in taste—look how it was received.”