Hollywood history is full of coincidences and happenstance, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting to hear that a pair of A-listers were once being lined up for a movie that ultimately ended up releasing at almost exactly the same time as the project they wound up co-starring in.
Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is now playing in theaters, with Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett playing leads Stanton Carlisle and Lilith Ritter. Both of them are winning rave reviews for their respective performances, as you’d expect given their reputations as two of the best in the business at what they do.
However, after del Toro revealed that DiCaprio was the first name attached to Nightmare Alley before scheduling conflicts ended his potential involvement, Variety’s Justin Kroll followed that up with an even more interesting tidbit.
DiCaprio and Lawrence could have led del Toro’s acclaimed psychological thriller, but instead they took top billing in Adam McKay’s polarizing disaster comedy Don’t Look Up. It’s an interesting situation, but if you believe in the notion of fate, then it looks as though the two Academy Award winners were destined to share the screen in a film written and directed by an Oscar winner that arrived before the end of 2021.
