10 Actors Who Almost Quit Hollywood Before Their Biggest Roles

One of the biggest virtues in life is to know when to quit. Eventually, you need to know when to preserve yourself and let go. It's a difficult lesson to learn, but it will serve us time and time again in life. In the same vein, another of life's biggest virtues is knowing when it's truly worth it to keep fighting the good fight. Just as you need to know when to choose yourself at times, you also need to know when to hold on. 

For a myriad of our favorite actors who once were nobodies just trying to make it, they spent so many years doing the latter that the former eventually seemed like the only option. But because they didn't give up and took one more chance, fate did as well.

Thankfully everything worked out, or else we'd never know their brilliance, and here are 10 actors who almost quit Hollywood before their biggest roles.

At this point, the world knows Lily Gladstone for bursting onto the scene with a fiery breakthrough role, nearly out of nowhere, as the female lead in a Martin Scorsese film — which is certainly a major responsibility to uphold. She was such a natural on screen that she ended up walking away with an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the 2023's "Killers of the Flower Moon," as well as an important and historic Golden Globe win. 

But not long before she was recognized for her powerful capabilities in front of the camera, she was taking steps to start training in another field after failed attempts to kick her career off. "You just wonder if it's going to be sustainable," Gladstone revealed to The Hollywood Reporter her struggle with steadily working in the business during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. "So I had my credit card out, registering for a data analytics course." Quite literally as she was putting in her information to purchase the course, she received an email with a request to have a video call with Scorsese. The rest, as they say, is history.

Nowadays, when you think heartthrob, you think Jacob Elordi. Or at least a lot of people do, with his presence as a bonafide modern movie star growing more and more each day. But he wasn't always as successful as he's now known to be. The Australian transplant moved to Los Angeles after shooting what would become the smash Netflix hit "The Kissing Booth," co-starring Joey King, in 2017, and after some time, things started to get dire. 

Elordi wasn't landing any roles and only had a few hundred dollars in his bank account, so it was getting to the point where he was going to have to head back home to Australia for awhile to replenish his finances. Then, as fate would have it, Elordi's last audition before hitting the road was HBO's soon-to-be-hit series "Euphoria," the undisputed springboard for his rise to fame. "I got really lucky," he told GQ of the experience in 2022. "Which is just an L.A. story, you know?"

Though Rashida Jones is one of the classic (and most talented) nepo baby actors, she didn't exactly have an easy go of it. Her father, after all, is more of a music legend — iconic producer and composer Quincy Jones — so his connects didn't necessarily help her get her acting career off the ground. It got to a point where Jones decided going back to school might make more sense in the long run.

"I said to myself, 'I'm going to do a couple more auditions, and then I'm gonna look at this application for grad school a lot more seriously,'" she revealed in an interview with Off Camera with Sam Jones. "I was co-producing a movie at the time, and I was also thinking about going back to school, maybe getting a degree in public policy or law or business, and then, you know, I got a break." That break came in the form of her very featured role as Karen Fillipelli on "The Office," which led to her breakout as Ann Perkins on "Parks and Recreation."

For many, getting older feels like the dead end of their dreams, and when Laverne Cox turned 40, she felt the same way. Her acting career had yet to take off, and she was in dire straits financially. It seemed like the best option would be to just quit. "I was in rent arrears on my apartment, I had rolled back rent," Cox said of that period of her life during a 2021 Paley Center pride month panel. "And I was in all kinds of debt, and I was going to give up acting actually."

Shortly after, she secured the role of Sophia on "Orange Is The New Black," which ended up making her the star she is today. She even ended up being the very first openly Trans person nominated for a primetime Emmy Award for her work on the show, so ultimately not only did she achieve her goals, she set the bar.

Once you start hitting your goals, what happens when the path upward seems stunted? For William Jackson Harper, he was finding success on television and theatre in the general sense when he decided he was "at peace" with leaving the industry behind. Despite having a pretty nice resume — especially when it came to theatre, as Jackson had a lot of Broadway and off-Broadway work under his belt from over the years — it had become increasingly more difficult to get work for the actor, so he was considering stepping back when he decided to go out for one last pilot season. 

The result was him bagging the role of Chidi Adagonye on "The Good Place," a part he ended up playing for four seasons. Further still, he snagged an Emmy nomination for best supporting actor for the role in 2020, officially making Jackson's last pilot season one of the most fruitful ever. Since then, he's gone on to appear in everything from A24 in "Midsommar" to Marvel blockbusters in "Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania."

Melissa McCarthy is not only a household name in comedy these days but a household name period. But when she was 29, she felt like she was coming to the end of her time as an actress. She had made a pact with herself that if she didn't get her big break by the time she turned 30, she would pack it in. But just a few days before the big milestone, she scored the iconic role of Sookie St. James on "Gilmore Girls," which opened the industry up to McCarthy in a major way. 

"[Gilmore Girls] ran for seven years. It was the first time I felt like I could say I was an actress because...I quit my nanny jobs, I quit all the production jobs," she revealed on an episode of The Howard Stern Show. Of course, she has gone on to be considered one of the funniest women in Hollywood, after breaking out even more in the R-rated comedy "Bridesmaids" (which also nearly had Paul Rudd make an appearance), so it's safe to say the key to success might truly just be to keep trying.

Believe it or not, even a legend like Naomi Watts had a hard time getting her footing in the industry once upon a time — but a wonderfully weird little angel by the name of David Lynch changed the game for her. "I wouldn't have stayed [in Hollywood] had I not met David Lynch. The chips were down, it was 10 years into flunking auditions [and] nothing was happening," Watts revealed on "Live With Kelly and Mark" following Lynch's 2025 death. "I was literally alienating people. I was making them uncomfortable because I was so like, 'I need a job! I need a job!'"

After her agent told her she was "too intense" to book jobs, she met Lynch, who put her through an unconventional audition for "Mulholland Drive," a film widely believed to be the greatest of the 21st century. Not only did she land the dual lead role of Betty and Diane, Watts said that Lynch truly "saw [her]" in that audition, making her big break that much sweeter.

It seems impossible to imagine mainstream comedy without the likes of "Schitt's Creek" star Annie Murphy these days. I mean, hello, that show has some of the most quotable lines of any show or movie ever. but there was a time when she felt that maybe acting wasn't actually going to work out for her. "My house had just burnt down, I had, like, $3 in my bank account," she revealed on "The Kelly Clarkson Show" in 2020. "I hadn't worked in close to two years. I found myself crying in the Pacific Ocean, a very snotty cry, and the universe was like, 'Don't do this anymore! This is not for you!' And two days later, I got the audition for 'Schitt's Creek.'"

Needless to say, she went on to see major success from starring opposite Dan Levy in the series, and even went home with an Emmy for her work in 2020. Aside from "Schitt's Creek," she is perhaps best known as the titular Joan in the beloved "Joan Is Awful" episode of "Black Mirror," which just might become an eventual classic. So it's safe to say Murphy's luck definitely turned around.

"Get Out" and "Skins" star Daniel Kaluuya looms large in our minds these days because of his exceptional skill, so it might come as a surprise that not everyone always saw his potential and ability. "I've never told you this, but when you reached out to me and we had that Skype, I was really disillusioned with acting. I had stopped acting for like a year and a half," Kaluuya told director Jordan Peele during an interview between them for Essence in 2022. "I checked out, because I was just like, this isn't working. I wasn't getting roles, because racism and all this kind of stuff, so you reaching out was like, Okay, I'm not crazy. It's proper. It's going to be all right." 

Peele's decision to work with Kaluuya — who was already respected in the UK because of his roles in "Skins" and an excellent episode of the first season of "Black Mirror" called "Fifteen Million Merits," which actually prompted Peele to cast Kaluuya – catapulted the actor to stardom worldwide. In 2021, his talent was recognized when he won an Oscar for his work in "Jesus and the Black Messiah."

In the post-2020 era of filmmaking, Hong Chau feels like a mainstay, but interestingly enough, she only came onto the scene a few years earlier with 2017's "Downsizing," a sci-fi dramedy from Alexander Payne, despite having been acting for a long time. "I've thought about quitting so many times because I've been doing this for 10 years now, and 'Downsizing' is only my second movie," she told E! News on the red carpet at the 2018 SAG Awards. "Every once in a while, something would come along that would keep you in there for another, like, couple of months before you'd want to quit again, and so luckily, I didn't quit, and I stuck with it."

During those years, she did have roles in "Inherent Vice" and TV shows "A To Z" and "Big Little Lies," but she really became a player in the mainstream after "Downsizing. She went on to star in Darren Aronofsky's 2022 drama "The Whale," for which she deeply impressed Aronofsky in the audition and later earned an Oscar nomination. as well as Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" in 2023 and Yorgos Lanthimos' anthology film "Kinds of Kindness" in 2024.