Courtney Love claims she lost out on a role in Fight Club after she told Brad Pitt he couldn’t make a movie about Kurt Cobain.
As fans of the 1999 movie will remember, Pitt played Tyler Durden alongside Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer.
However, during a recent interview on the WTF podcast, Cobain’s widow Love says she was initially signed up to play Marla until she turned down Pitt’s pitch for a movie about her late husband’s life.
Love claimed she was approached by Pitt and director Gus Van Sant in regard to making a movie about Cobain but that she wasn’t keen - and that’s putting it mildly.
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Speaking on the podcast, she said: “I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt. I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the f** k do you think [you] are?”
She recalled telling Pitt: “I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit.
"They’re really good social justice movies, but … if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad.” So she certainly didn’t mince her words, but, according to Love it was this rejection that led to her being dropped from the role, with her then-partner Norton being the one to break the bad news. That can’t have been much fun for either of them.
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“He starts sobbing,” she said. “And he was like, ‘I don’t have the power!’” She said she was later called up by director David Fincher who confirmed she would no longer be starring in the movie.
Love went on to admit that it was something she regretted, revealing: “I still kick myself for not having the shark instinct to be like, sure, and f**k them later. I was so dumb.”
Love also revealed that she’s still never watched the movie after being dropped.
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Van Sant did go on to make a movie about Cobain’s life, titled Last Days, but she confirmed on the podcast this wasn’t the same movie Pitt had been hoping to make.
Love and Cobain married in 1992 and remained married up until his death by suicide in 1994 - he was just 27.
Elsewhere on the podcast, Love said she believed only ever known two true musical ‘geniuses’ - Cobain and Lana Del Rey, who she referred to as ‘magic’.
She explained: “And by that I mean they can Spielberg anything.”
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Music, Brad Pitt
Claire Reid