What Role Did Jonah Hill Have to Pass Up in ‘Django Unchained’?

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Jonah Hill's performance in "Moneyball" was acclaimed in part because people don't associate him with dramas, but there were signs before that film that the comedic actor had wanted to pursue his serious side. When we saw "Cyrus," the dark comedy-drama where he plays the creepily overprotective son to young mom Marisa Tomei, at Sundance in 2010, Hill spoke afterward, and he definitely conveyed the sense that he wasn't just "the funny guy." In the Q&A, he was smart and articulate, and his performance in "Cyrus" was so good because it was still funny while being nuanced and weird at the same time. But it wasn't just "Cyrus" and "Moneyball" where we could have seen his acting range. Turns out he also could have been in Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained."


That revelation came up during an interview with MTV when he was asked what sorts of dramas he gets offered in the wake of "Moneyball":

"I got offered the new Quentin Tarantino movie, and I can't do it because of my schedule, which sucks. Things like that are crazy exciting, different and cool. Being asked to be in dramas now, it's really exciting. I feel lucky to have the kind of career I have where I can do both."

Yeah, yeah, great, but what role would it have been? That's not clear, so we went over to the movie's IMDb page to see if we could guess. Assuming it's a part that's been cast already, we narrowed it down to Leonardo DiCaprio's plantation-owner character or Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Australian villain. The DiCaprio role seems pretty unlikely, while the Gordon-Levitt one sounds more plausible. But what if it wasn't either of those parts? Maybe he was up for the role of the still-not-cast Scott Harmony, whom The Playlist describes as a "24 year-old kid whose father buys the slave Broomhilda [Django's wife] for him to boost his confidence." Hill's going to turn 28 next month, so it's definitely in his age range.

By the way, Hill's recent flirtation with drama hardly means that he's abandoning comedy to be at the grownups' table. He'll be in "The Sitter," which we're concerned about, and he'll be in "21 Jump Street," which has a great trailer. Hey, it's no "Django Unchained," but it does look promising.


Jonah Hill Turned Down Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained'
[MTV News]