When you think about some of Jonah Hill’s most famous roles, you might notice that they all have one thing in common. they are comedic. At the beginning of his career, he wrote and performed his own plays at a bar in New York City. In 2004, he paved his way to the world of acting with the black comedy film I Heart Huckabees.
Hill’s following roles were also in comedies. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he played an eBay customer. After that, he appeared in Grandma’s Boy, Click, Accepted, 10 Items or Less, Rocket Science, Knocked Up, and Evan Almighty. All of these roles were from the initial three years of his professional career on the big screen.
Hill played Seth in the 2007 teen comedy Superbad, which was produced by Judd Apatow. This role would become the most important part of his early career. Seth Rogen was the writer. He and Hill had been in The 40-Year-Old Virgin together. Rogen was supposed to play Seth, but when he saw that he didn’t look like a high schooler, he gave the part to Hill.
Hill’s co-star in Superbad was Michael Cera, and the chemistry between them and the rest of the cast was the stuff of which careers are made. Needless to say, Hill got a lot of offers for similar roles, but he wanted to change the way people saw him in his career.
Jonah Hill Turned Down All Main Roles In The Hangover Franchise
After his breakthrough role in Superbad, Jonah Hill became one of Hollywood’s most popular comedy actors. He was offered multiple funny roles, but he didn’t want to be typecast as just a funny guy. So, when the producers of The Hangover movies asked him to play one of the main roles in their first movie, he surprised a lot of people by saying declining.
The 2009 movie The Hangover is about three friends named Phil, Stu, and Alan who go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party and wake up the next day with no memory of what happened the night before, a missing groom, a tiger in their hotel room, and other crazy things. Bradley Cooper played Phil, Ed Helms played Stu, and Zach Galifianakis played Alan in the movie.
Hill was reportedly given the choice of any of the three main roles, but he turned them all down because he was afraid of becoming a stereotype in Hollywood.
What Kind Of Roles Was Jonah Hill Looking For After Superbad?
Jonah Hill was very realistic about what he should do next in his career after his role in Superbad brought him so much success. On the one hand, he didn’t always want to be judged by the strange things his character did.
A genuine fear of mine was that I was going to be known as ‘The Guy from Superbad’ for the rest of my life,
he said in an interview with Bullett, as per IGN.
Hill was instead determined to challenge himself as an actor by taking on different kinds of roles.
They were both really big decisions, and ones that most people didn’t understand,
In the same interview, he went on to talk about why he turned down a role opposite Shia LaBeouf in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
But Jonah Hill knew that making the change from comedy to drama would take time and work.
I knew I could be a dramatic actor, but I also knew I couldn’t go from Superbad to Schindler’s List.
Does Jonah Hill Regret Saying No To Roles In The Hangover Franchise?
Even though Jonah Hill turned down the chance to be in what is now a legendary franchise, his decision to branch out in his acting career seems to have paid off. He hasn’t said in public whether or not he regrets the choice. The way his career has turned out, it only suggests that he doesn’t.
The Hangover trilogy made a total of $1.42 billion at the box office, making it one of the most successful comedy series of all time. The first movie in the series, The Hangover, made $467.5 million worldwide on a $35 million budget. The Hangover Part II made $586.8 million at the box office, and the last movie in the trilogy made $362 million.
Hill, for his part, was nominated twice for the Academy Award for “Best Supporting Actor” in dramatic roles. The first was for his role in the sports biopic Moneyball, which came out in 2011. The second was for his role in The Wolf of Wall Street as Donnie Azoff, a real-life character in the story of Jordan Belfort’s rise and fall on Wall Street.
