Thomas Jane Turned Down TWD's Rick Grimes Role for a Short-Lived Series No One Remembers
The actor made a pretty big mistake in choosing his next career move.
In the early 2000s, Thomas Jane was considered a fairly reliable leading man, capable of carrying some small Hollywood productions to success.
Although the actor fell out of favor by the end of the decade, producers were still reaching out to him, offering Jane a number of great acting opportunities.
Unfortunately, Jane wasn't so wise with his career choices — you may remember that he turned down the role of Don Draper in Mad Men, arguing that he was too big of a movie star to even consider the possibility of starring in a TV series. But even this major failure wasn't the most puzzling in Jane's infamous resume of rejections.
When Frank Darabont was casting AMC's The Walking Dead, he immediately thought of his The Mist collaborator Jane and offered him to play the central character in the zombie series. However, the actor declined the invitation, prompting Darabont to cast Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes. Instead of the lead role in the future cult series, Jane chose to accept HBO's offer to star in the comedy series Hung, and it's not hard to see why.
At the time, HBO was considered the best network for critically acclaimed TV series, so Jane naturally thought that betting on Hung was a much safer option than agreeing to star in a weird zombie series. Sadly, that was a misjudgement that totally changed the future of his career.
While Hung became a pretty revered series in its own right, earning great reviews from fans and critics, it was nowhere near as popular as The Walking Dead, which became one of the defining series of the last decade. Lincoln made an ungodly amount of money on the show and became a superstar, while Jane was drowning in all the straight-to-DVD releases, probably kicking herself for not listening to Darabont.
Thomas Jane is rightly considered one of the most unlucky actors out there, having turned down two hugely successful series due to his lack of instinct. Although he has been slowly crawling back to fame in recent years, his career could have been much more successful if he had agreed to move from film to television earlier and put his ego aside for future recognition.