“Hey, I’m gonna be a star.” That was almost Sam Rockwell‘s line in “Lean on Me.” The 1989 film which starred Morgan Freeman as the real-life educator Joe Louis Clark. Rockwell was cast in the film, but — as he revealed during a recent appearance on the podcast “Happy Sad Confused” — that one line ended up going to Michael Imperioli.
“They never got to my scene,” Rockwell explained to host Josh Horowitz (via Entertainment Weekly). “So they had to let me go because they didn’t want to pay me for a week. So they got to pay for a day player or pay for a week. So they… let me go. They fired me… And because they were like, ‘Ah, we can’t pay them a week for one line.’ And then they hired Michael, and Michael [Imperioli] got it. Michael’s in the movie, but I still got residuals… I still get residual checks for that, even though I’m not in it.”
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Ironically, Imperioli had joined Rockwell and Kevin Corrigan on a drive to New Jersey, where the trio auditioned for the film. But Rockwell might have dodged a bullet. Imperioli told The New Yorker in 2024 that director John G. Avildsen was “not very nice.”
“But I’d never been in front of a camera,” Imperiolo said. “This was the ’80s. There were giant Panavision cameras, and I didn’t know where to look. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I mumbled the line thinking maybe they won’t notice me or something. And then [Avildsen] comes and starts giving direction. He goes, ‘And you with that “Gonna be a star,” you’d better give me something or you’re out of here!’ I was horrified. I think, I’m horrible, I suck.”
Several years later, Rockwell found himself once again pitted against Imperioli — or at least compared to him, this time in the 1998 Woody Allen flick “Celebrity.”
“I was a part of [Leonardo] DiCaprio’s entourage. And I had a few lines and they said, ‘Woody wants you to dye your hair bleach blonde,” he recalled. Rockwell countered that he would not dye his hair for five lines, but the team was insistent, “Woody wants you to do it.” Rockwell refused.
“And they’re like, ‘Well, Michael Imperioli was gonna do it.’ Cause he had dropped out. And I was replacing Michael — because Michael was going to do a little pilot called ‘Sopranos,’ that I heard didn’t go anywhere.” Rockwell said. “And so I said, “All right, I’ll dye my hair.”
Rockwell is currently riding high on the major critical acclaim received by the third installment of “The White Lotus,” for which he’s a frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series category at the Emmys.
