Charlie Sheen Felt Betrayed When Oliver Stone Cast Tom Cruise In "Born On The Fourth of July"
- Dan Lalonde
- Oct 31, 2025
- 2 min read
How many Tom Cruise films do you think he should have won an Oscar for? I personally have the opinion he should have won for 'Top Gun', 'Jerry Maguire', Minority Report', 'Magnolia', 'Rain Man', 'A Few Good Men', and of course the most obvious 'Born On The Fourth Of July.'
Charlie Sheen (Two And A Half Men) is opening up on 'In Depth With Graham Bensinger' about how he felt betrayed when Oliver Stone, whom he had just acted for in 'Platoon', cast Tom Cruise in the role of real-life Vietnam activist Ron Kovic in a part that Sheen was promised with a handshake from Stone. He found out the casting change from his brother, Emilio Estevez, with a late-night phone call.
“Emilio, he calls me. He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right? I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?” He says, ‘Cruise is doing 'Born on the Fourth.' "I love that Emilio thought that I needed to be seated to get news he thought was going to make me faint. I mean, what are we doing here? It’s a movie.”
Sheen said he felt stabbed in the back, and he felt the part was his after the two had dinner with Ron Kovic: “It was also the betrayal factor of it. So I was like, ‘OK, all right.’ You know, Oliver’s been a fan of Tom’s for a long time. It’s a different movie if Tom does it than if I do it. And then I stopped hearing from him [Stone]. We stopped talking about it, and I reach out to Oliver, and I’m told that he’s in Cuba. Whatever. This is like 1988 or ’89, right? I’m like, ‘OK, well, tell him I’m looking for him.'”
Sheen would later finally talk to Stone when they both ended up at the same bar: “I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up. And he was like, ‘I just felt like you didn’t have any passion for it. I felt like you lost interest.’ I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t see you. How do you know how much passion I lost or interest that evaporated if we never talked about it again?'”
Sheen also said he lost his bitterness long ago, and he never had negative feelings towards Cruise: "You can’t lose something you never had. I didn’t sign a contract. There was a handshake. It wasn’t like a thing where I’m going to talk shit about Tom, because then you see the movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, OK. All right. He turned it into that. When someone gets a job and does that with it, you’re just like, of course. You don’t sit there and dissect it and like, ‘I’d have done that better.’ No, go f_ _k yourself. That’s a brilliant [performance] — and you should have won the freaking Oscar.”
What are your thoughts on 'Hot Shots', where Sheen pretty much played Cruise in the spoof film? Comment below with your thoughts.
Visit Dan Lalonde Films For All Technology And Entertainment News
Source: Variety
Photo Credit: Universal Pictures/MGM
Comments