4. Jack Nicholson, The Departed
Jack Nicholson who has three-time Academy Awards is probably one of the only actors who can turn down an offer to be in a movie directed by Martin Scorsese. When he was recruited to play the role of Frank Costello in “The Departed”, he instantly declined it because the script for this character included very few lines. It took Leonardo DiCaprio and Scorsese himself to convince Nicholson to sign onto the film, but there was a catch.
Nicholson demand that his role will be rewritten, so to get it done Nicholson worked alongside with Scorsese behind the scenes to make it happen. “Marty is very free with his ideas,” Nicholson told Variety. “We built this character layer by layer, until we had something that fit inside a great genre film.”
