Mika Boorem, Hearts in Atlantis, 2000. Change of Carol Gerber in a sadly tepid 70th of Stephen King's staggering 313 screen credits – stolen by Anthony Hopkins as,- what else? – a psychic. Not enough for Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, who complained that Australian director Scott Hicks coated the film in" a bogus idyllic mist that substitutes cheap sentiment for blunt truth."
Rachel Hurd-Wood, Peter Pan, 2002. The 2016 Oscar-winner (for The Room, 2015) auditioned for the darling Wendy Darling. "I had started acting when I was seven," she told the Hollywood Reporter Stephen Galloway in November 2015. "and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition process], but I wasn't a perfect package of one thing. I wasn't a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn't pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn't mousy enough to be the mousy girl, so I never fit in. And so I'd get close, but I never got anywhere, and it was really painful."
Nicole Paggi, Hope & Faith, TV, 2003-2006. On April 2, 2003, Larson, Josh Stamberg, Slade Pearce were Sydney, Charley and Justin in the ABC pilot. They were then dumped and Paggi, Ted McGinley, Paulie Litt re-shot the opener on August 16, 2004 - and made the series. Brie, actress-singer, joined Toni Collette in United States of Tara, TV, 2009. Brie had no qualms relating how tough her career had been. "Oh, I quit many times. It was too hard. So I went back to college a couple of times to be a photographer, and then an interior designer, and then, at the real depths of it, I wanted to be an animal trainer."
Kaley Cuoco, The Big Bang Theory, TV, 2007-2019. Too young – at 18 - for Penny, the great girl across the hall from the two CalTech geeks, Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki, who knew zilch about women. And it lasted a dozen years, making Parsons and Cuco the world's highest-paid TV actors… to the respective tunes of $29m and $28m. Ah, yes, but Brie won (a) an Oscar, (b) Captain Marvel and (c) a French cheese named after her. Say what? Oh, t'other way around...
Teresa Palmer, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, 2008. In her pre-Oscar days, poor Brie days, Brie had to audition for such roles as Becky Barnes (the apple of a ten-year-old heros's eye in a Disney trifle starring Nicolas Cage as a magician called Balthazar. Boring!
Emma Roberts, Adult World, 2011. A few years back, the Hawaii-born auteur Scott Coffey had Julia Roberts toying with one of his scripts. Emma didn't toy... just jumped at the poet wannabe working in an adult book shop. "I won't do things for money. I can't," said Brie. "I don't have kids and I'm fine eating cereal if that's what it takes." And she finally had her Jennifer Lawrence moment with Short Term 12 in 2013.
Imogen Poots, She's Funny That Way, 2013. For his first movie since The Cat's Cradle in 2000, director Peter Bogdanovich rescued his long dropped '90s screwball comedy called Squirrels to the Nuts (a Lubitsch line from Cluny Brown, 1945). Due to busy agendas, he lost Larson and Olivia Wilde as Izzy, a hooker-turned actress, who becomes the main squeeze of Quentin Tarantino – playing Quentin Tarantino! The Londoner took over as Izzy in the scenario by Peter and his ex-wife, Louise Stratten (sister of his murdered wife Dorothy).
Emilia Clarke, Terminator: Genisys, 2014. "Come with me if you want to live… " Picking up the line from the guys in the Terminator franchise, the Game of Thrones find beat off Emily Blunt, Margot Robbie and future Oscar-wnner Brie Larson to Linda Hamilton's iconic role of Sarah Connor. Ironically, Emilia's GOT co-star, Lena Headey, had been Sarah in the 2008 series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Small world.
Clara Delevingne, Suicide Squad, 2015. After 19 possible Deadshots and 14 Harley Quinns, director David Ayer searched through eleven young beauties for June Moone, aka Enchantress (the DC villain, not Marvel's rival to Thor). The contenders were Larson, Troian Bellisario (tied to Pretty Little Liars) Emilia Clarke (nothing without her Game of Thrones'dragons), Alexandra Daddario, Megan Fox, Ellen Page, Krysten Ritter, Saoirse Ronan, Emma Stone, Alicia Vikander, Shailene Woodley. And told the winning Delevingne to prepare for the role by stripping naked in the woods and walk in mud, preferably during a full moon. Takes all sorts. Film still flopped!
Emma Stone, Battle of the Sexes, 2016. As the new Oscar winner's schedules changed, Stone was in, out, then back in again as the world #2 tennis champion Billy Jean King, 29, walloping the braggadocious ass of a sexist, ageing ex-Wimbledon champ Bobby Riggs, 55, in three sets - 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 - at the Houston Astrodome, Texas, on September 20, 1973. Riggs avowed that no woman could be his equal in tennis. He beat the then #1 woman player, Margaret Court leading to the $100,000 winner takes all battle watched by a global 90m viewers … already dramatised in ABC's 2001 tele-film, When Billie Beat Bobby, with Holly Hunter and Ron Silver.
Jessie Buckley, I'm Thinking of Ending Tings, 2019. Brie was the chosen one. And must have been (but you're ahead of me) cheesed off when Jessie actually played the girl known variously as Louisa, Lucia, and Lucy, Lucia, and Louisa.