![]() ![]() Lamenting what he said were trumped-up anecdotes meant to illustrate what a bad boy he was, he told the New York Times in 1995, "So they make it sound like I go to clubs to wreck myself silly, get into fights, sleep with all the ratty girls there. ![]() This guy is good.'"ĭiCaprio, meanwhile, was having his own issues at the time with what he was being made to look like off-camera during the three months they spent in New York shooting the movie. But we started reading the scenes-and I looked at him and he looked at me-and I was like, 'Oh shit. "I was like, 'I've seen this dude play ball!' So we both had a bit of chip on our shoulder. "He wasn't a New York street guy basketball player," Mark said. I was not nice to Leo that day."Īnd, as it turned out, while DiCaprio wasn't initially into the idea of acting with him, Wahlberg didn't exactly think Leo was a great choice to play Jim, either. "We had a weird run in at an MTV Rock and Jock basketball game," Wahlberg explained the storied '90s-era animosity between him and DiCaprio to Huffington Post "I was performing in my underwear at half time and I think I had blocked a shot of his. He's so good, he deserves to get the part." So I told the producer, I don't care about the baggage. "He did this scene where his brother beats him up because he didn't steal the car right. "Then when I saw him audition, he blew me away," Carroll told Tiffen about Wahlberg. Leonardo said, 'No way, I'm not making a movie with Marky Mark.' As did a lot of other people." "He said, 'You guys should be actors and you will be actors.' He called me in for the film. " only said this to three people-Tupac, Will Smith and myself," Wahlberg recalled to Huffington Post in 2014. But Wahlberg, with Kalvert's support, auditioned six and eventually won him over. ( Silver Spoons star Ricky Schroder also apparently stated his desire to play Jim Carroll during a talk show appearance around that time.)Ĭarroll wasn't too keen on the idea of Mark Wahlberg, best known at the time for his underwear modeling and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, playing Jim's addict pal Mickey, a composite tough-guy character based on numerous people Carroll knew from the streets growing up. He didn't think Phoenix could play basketball, but he was willing to work around that. ![]() They said, 'what are you doing next?' River said, 'well, I just want to do ensemble pieces with other good actors.' He said, 'the only lead I want to do is…' and he whips out a copy of The Basketball Diaries! And says 'Play Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries.' I was sitting with my girlfriend in bed, you know, like just a citizen! I could have been a worker in the sanitation department, the state of mind I was in, you know? I was living way uptown. "I was watching Entertainment Tonight, they were interviewing him after he got nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. "Then it was River Phoenix, who I didn't even know about," Carroll told Tiffen, talking about the string of actors mentioned over the years. In reality, he was a fan of the book and got to meet Carroll, but Phoenix was never cast in the version of the production that actually made it to the screen. It became part of the overarching mythos surrounding River Phoenix that the Stand by Me star was going to play Jim, but then died of an accidental drug overdose in 1993. Ultimately, Leo's proven acting chops combined with his physical resemblance to Carroll ("I wasn't quite as thin!" the writer later protested) earned him the part over a slew of his peers. Leonardo DiCaprio had only made a couple of movies (not including the scenes he shot for Drew Barrymore's femme fatale thriller Poison Ivy that were left on the cutting room floor), but the 20-year-old actor was already Oscar-nominated, for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and had even already starred in a coming-of-age tale adapted from a memoir, This Boy's Life. But the years kept going by, and the project kept changing hands. The decades-long journey to bring Jim Carroll's gut punch of a memoir to the big screen was finally at the casting crossroads, and it was time to fill the role of the former teen basketball talent, hustler and heroin addict who splashed onto the literary scene chronicling his demons and became a celebrated writer, poet, punk rocker and all-around New York cultural icon unto himself.įrom Matt Dillon and River Phoenix to Ethan Hawke and Eric Stoltz, the 1980s' freshest faces had all been ready to get dirty at some point over the years. Seemingly every hot young actor in Hollywood wanted to star in The Basketball Diaries at some point. ![]()
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