A Severance Star Missed Out On A Role In Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut

For much of the cast of "Severance," the show is the culmination of years and years of hard work in the trenches of Hollywood, plugging away at one show or movie after another until "Severance" came along to finally give them their big break. But for John Turturro, who plays the soft-spoken MDR employee Irving B., "Severance" is just one more credit in a long and industrious career.

He got his first film role as a non-speaking extra in Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull," and since then, Turturro has worked with some of the other greatest directors of his generation. From his work with William Friedkin in "To Live and Die in L.A." and Robert Redford in "Quiz Show," to his long-standing collaborations with not just high-class auteurs like Spike Lee (in which he's appeared in nine films) and the Coen brothers but also juvenile slapstick with Adam Sandler, Turturro has built the kind of career most actors could only dream of.

Of course, that doesn't mean he's without his own regrets, because in an interview with Happy Sad Confused with Josh Horowitz, Turturro looked back on his career and spoke about how he wishes he could have worked with directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. But the director he feels the deepest regret about is none other than Stanley Kubrick, who Turturro says had called him in the lead-up to what would turn out to be the director's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," for a two-hour long conversation in which Kubrick praised Turturro's terrific acting ability and his fascination with the Jewish-Italian chemist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (who Turturro was had just portrayed in the 1997 film "The Truce"). 

This phone call was meant to end with Turturro being cast in "Eyes Wide Shut" ... if only Turturro had picked up on the signals sooner.

It turns out that Kubrick had written a role specifically for Turturro in his upcoming film, "Eyes Wide Shut." Kubrick had envisioned Turturro for the part of the piano player Nick Nightingale, who ushers Tom Cruise's repressed Dr. Harford into a world of occult sex rituals, and offered him the part over the phone, but Tuturro explained how a bit of miscommunication led to him losing out on the role:

"I said, 'I'll read it and we'll work it out.' I was talking to him like a normal person. And he said, 'Well, how can I get you the script?' I said, 'Well, FedEx it.' He goes, 'What if you're not home?' I said, 'Well, I know my FedEx man. His name is Ray and he throws it over the gate,' right?"

Kubrick found this story to be "unbelievable," to which Turturro jokingly replied, "Well, do you know your FedEx man?" He explains that he was just trying to behave like a normal person while talking to a man whose work he respects so much, but his casual behavior inadvertently gave the appearance that he wasn't interested in the part: 

"And the next day, I heard that I wasn't available. I was unavailable because I didn't tell him, you know, 'No matter what [I'll be there].' I didn't know that at the time..."

Just from his tone of voice, you can hear Turturro is genuinely regretful for not realizing that Kubrick expected all his actors to put all other projects second to his, although he does admit to a bit of morbid curiosity to know if he "would have survived doing a hundred takes" because "Eyes Wide Shut" found the director taking his exhausting filmmaking methods to new extremes. The 15 month production proved to be too much for Harvey Keitel, who was replaced by Sydney Pollack.

Would Turturro have survived or might he have been replaced by Todd Field, the "Tár" director who ultimately got the part? We'll never know, but at the very least, the film's reputation has only grown over the past twenty years, with Kubrick's final masterpiece set to be inducted into the Criterion Collection later this year.