22 Actors Who Almost Quit Acting Right Before They Bagged A Major Role

It seems that the spotlight is really meant for them.

Liezel

• Published in Film & TV
• April 26, 2022

We think we all know that making it in Hollywood, even just as an actor with consistent jobs, isn't easy at all. A lot of people spend years and so much effort trying to make it.

Some of them even move from different parts of the world to entertainment hubs like LA just so they could have a better chance of getting discovered. A lot of people also work double jobs just so they could keep pursuing that dream of being on the big screen with the big names of Hollywood.

In fact, we've heard those kinds of stories countless times before of this guy or girl who worked at so many restaurants just to make ends meet and still keep going to auditions or something like that from many of our fave celebs. They also had to work their butts off proving to the industry that they were worth a shot.

Some of them even came so close to giving it all up and just packing it and opting for a normal life. And, of course, with how hard it was to get a break, it's an understandable decision.

Luckily, a lot of them got just the role they needed right before they made that final decision. Here are 22 celebs who almost quit just before getting the role that made them big.

John Krasinski

Krasinski's mother has always supported him in pursuing his acting career and she even advised him to keep at it and look where it goes for two and a half or three years. After those two and a half years with little success though, the actor was ready to give up but his mother convinced him to wait a little longer.

"I was like, 'So, I'm out. This is terrible. It's so scary. This is the worst. Waiting tables, not as fun as they say,'" Krasinski said. "And she said, 'You know, it's September. Just wait it out. Just wait 'til the end of the year. Don't give up just yet.' I was telling her to come get me. ... And three weeks later I got The Office."

Gal Gadot

In 2020, Gal Gadot revealed to Access Hollywood that right before she got her breakout role as Wonder Woman, she told her husband that she wasn't sure if acting was right for her.

"There's so much rejection in this profession, and it came to a point where I was just like, 'Is it really worth it?'" Gadot said. "We were in LA for a trip, and I was telling my husband, 'Look, we're here now, but we're leaving in two weeks...I don't know if we'll ever come again. I don't know if I want to pursue [acting].' And then, during those two weeks, I had the Wonder Woman audition... Isn't it crazy the way the world, the universe, works?"

Monique Coleman

In a 2016 interview with Buzzfeed, Coleman said that she was ready to give up her dreams of acting right when she was called back to audition for the role of Taylor McKessie in High School Musical.

"I was going through a period, which a lot of actors go through, where you are on the brink of giving up because it just doesn't look like it's going to happen for you," Coleman said.

Melissa McCarthy

In 2019, McCarthy told Howard Stern that she decided that if she hasn't made it in Hollywood by age 30, she would switch career paths. Then, just a few days before her 30th birthday, she got a call telling her that she got the part of Sookie St. James in Gilmore Girls.

That was the role that changed McCarthy's life and allowed her to leave all the part-time gigs she was working at that time.

"[Gilmore Girls] ran for seven years. It was the first time I felt like I could say I was an actress because...I quit my nanny jobs, I quit all the production jobs," McCarthy said.

Cindy Williams

Cindy Williams' most iconic role is that of Shirley Feeney in the tv series Laverne & Shirley but in 2015, the actress revealed that she was actually close to taking up a job as a waitress before getting that part.

"It was just at the end of this two-year period where I'd gone up for all these parts, been up for all these big parts, and hadn't gotten them," Williams said. "I was kind of depressed at the time, and I was going to get a job as a waitress." 

Max Greenfield

In 2020, on Live With Kelly and Ryan, Greenfield admitted that when his daughter was still an infant, he wasn't getting much work as an actor so he called up his friend Todd Milliner who produced the series Hot In Cleveland to see if he could find clerical work.

"I thought, 'I don't think I want to do this anymore...auditioning and acting.' It was too much for me," Greenfield said. "And I called our friend Todd Milliner...and I was like, 'Hey, man, can I have a job just in the office? I have no other skills. I can't do anything. There's nothing to fall back on.'"

At that time, Hot In Cleveland wasn't in production yet so Milliner told Greenfield to wait a little longer. Soon, the actor auditioned for his big break playing the character Schmidt in New Girl.

"I was like, 'Alright, I guess I'll go on these last couple auditions I have,' and one of them was New Girl," Greenfield said.

William Jackson Harper

"I was thinking, OK, I could give [theater and acting] up, I could, you know, quit entirely, and I definitely had that thought," Harper said in a 2017 interview with Box Angeles. "No longer will theater and acting be the center of my life. ... I had sort of come to be at peace with that."

"I was like, well, look, this will probably be my last pilot season. I'm not going to focus on [theater and acting] anymore the way I have been...I can't rely on that," Harper added.

That pilot season, however, he got an audition for The Good Place and he scored the role of Chidi Anagonye.

Cole Sprouse

After starring in The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and the spinoff series The Suite Life on Deck, Sprouse took a five-year hiatus from acting where he studied archeology at the NYU. He was actually working at an archeological lab when his manager called him up to audition for the part of Jughead Jones in Riverdale.

"My manager begged me to come out for pilot week, and I was doing photography and archaeology, and I said, 'If I don't get anything...I don't think I'm gonna come back,'" Sprouse said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2018. "And then, sure enough, I booked Riverdale, and it just sort of fell into place."

Joshua Bassett

In 2021, the actor admitted to Access Hollywood that right before he bagged the role of Ricky in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, he almost walked away from acting. His father, however, advised him to pursue it for just a month longer.

"It was, like, audition after audition of me getting really close to things, and the reason why I wasn't getting them was always ridiculous. It was either somebody had a larger social media platform or some ridiculous reason," Bassett said. "I was just getting really frustrated, and I remember telling my dad, 'The joy of [acting] is gone. I don't enjoy it anymore. It's not something I want to do.' And he [was] like, 'You've gone this far, why don't you just wait it out a month?' And I was like, 'OK, fine.' ... I was ready to quit that day. And then just about a month later is when I got the show."

Hong Chau

Before she got the part of Ngoc Lan Tran in the film Downsizing, Chau was actually contemplating giving up acting.

"I've thought about quitting so many times because I've been doing this for 10 years now, and Downsizing is only my second movie," Chau said before adding, "Every once in a while something would come along that would keep you in there for another, like, couple of months before you'd want to quit again, and so luckily I didn't quit and I stuck with it."

Milo Ventimiglia

Gilmore Girls might have had a different face for Jess Mariano because right before Ventimiglia bagged the role, he was actually thinking of quitting acting.

"I think right before Gilmore was one moment where I questioned if I wanted to stay in acting," Ventimiglia said to Entertainment Weekly in 2017. "I've had three [moments] in my 22 years where I was gonna quit. ... I was gonna go be an auto mechanic."

Eric Stonestreet

"I actually had one of my biggest and lowest valleys about two months before I got the audition for Modern Family," Stonestreet said to Scott Carty in a 2017 interview. "I was really deciding, do I stay in it, because I have enough traction and ... casting directors know me and I've created enough of a career for myself that I could probably continue doing it, or do I split now and start Stonestreet Meats or whatever I wanted to do? I always wanted to be a concierge butcher. I didn't know."

Luckily, a friend of his, actor Marshall Bell, convinced him to stay. Soon, Stonestreet got the call for Modern Family and went into one of the best phases of his acting career.

"I went from literally one of my lowest point of my career to winning an Emmy within a year," Stonestreet said.

Brie Larson

After losing a part in United States of Tara, Larson contemplated going back to school.  "I was toying with the idea of either studying interior design or marine biology, but then I got a call," Larson said to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2017. 

The call was actually from producers for United States of Tara saying that they had decided to recast the part she originally auditioned for and this time around, she was offered the role.

Chrissy Metz

"Literally, I was going to quit acting and move back home, and now my mom's going to be my Emmy date," Metz told Tpday in 2017 after receiving an Emmy nomination for her role as Kate Pearson in This Is Us. Metz also shared on the Rachael Ray Show that she only had 81 cents left in the bank when she booked the show.

Rashida Jones

Jones was actually planning to go back to school right when The Office role of Karen Filippelli came her way.

"I said to myself, 'I'm going to do a couple more auditions, and then I'm gonna look at this application for grad school a lot more seriously,'" Jones said in a 2015 Off Camera With Sam Jones interview. "I was co-producing a movie at the time and I was also thinking about going back to school, maybe getting a degree in public policy or law or business, and then, you know, I got a break. I mean, that's really the only thing that brought me back, was The Office."

Millie Bobby Brown

"I think I was just very disheartened by the rejection, which is something that I tell everyone, is like, this industry is...just full of rejection 24/7," Brown told Jimmy Fallon in a 2020 interview. "I was auditioning for commercials for anything, really. I then auditioned for Game of Thrones, and I got a no for that. And then, that's kind of when I was kind of like, oh, this is really difficult, and I guess I really wanted that role."

Following that setback, however, one of Brown's last goes at acting was for a Netflix show titled Montauk which then, later on, became Stranger Things. She won the starring role of Eleven and is now one of the biggest stars of her generation.

Laverne Cox

"I was just devastated by, like, turning 40, and my life was kind of in shambles financially, and I had worked and trained a lot, and my dream of being a working actress had not come to fruition," Cox said during an interview for the Paley Center's Pride Month programming in June 2021. "I was just like, 'I've got to do something else. I mean, who do I think I am? I'm a Black transgender woman — no one's ever done this before, let me go and do something, have a real job or something.'"  

Cox was actually thinking about going to grad school when she auditioned for the part of Sophia in Orange is the New Black. The role would then lead her to be the first openly transgender actor to receive a primetime Emmy nomination.

Chris Hemsworth

While discussing his early struggles with Australian Men's Health in 2021, Hemsworth said, “I was about to quit. I got more and more anxious to the point where I couldn’t harness or use that energy. It was all to my detriment.”

Among his last goes at it was an audition for the lead role of Curt in The Cabin in the Woods which he secured. Soon after, he got the role of Thor in The Avengers film series.

Robert Pattinson

After auditioning for Edward Cullen in Twilight, Pattinson was ready to call it quits before he knew he got the role.

“The audition was one of the worst auditions I did in my whole life. I remember calling my parents and saying, ‘I’m done, I can’t torture myself anymore,’” Pattinson said to Today in 2019.

Jon Hamm

"I moved out to LA [for acting] when I was 25 and I thought, 'If I'm 30 and I'm still waiting tables, it's time to move on to something else,'" Hamm said in a 2018 interview for ABC News.

He did, however, end up spending his 30th birthday on the set of We Were Soldiers which was the first major Hollywood film he starred in.

"I was totally thrilled. I had a bunch of my old friends fly down to come see me. And I was like, I'm making a living as an actor and I did it. I made it under the wire," Hamm said.

Noah Centineo

After moving from his home state in Florida to Los Angeles, Centineo auditioned for many roles. It led to him shooting a pilot and although the pilot wasn't picked up, Centineo signed a contract for the job stating that he couldn't take any other auditions for six months.

That time period, sadly, was very discouraging for the actor. “My purpose was just to act, and you take away someone’s purpose and you kind of deteriorate them,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in 2018.

Just as he was about to call it quits though, he got the part of Jesus on the Freeform series The Fosters.

Kiki Layne

When she guested on the Tamron Hall Show in 2021, Layne said she felt discouraged about her acting career after moving out to LA. She asked the universe for a sign and even borrowed her roommate's tarot cards just to see if they held any wisdom as to what she should do next.

"I grabbed those cards, and I don't know anything about tarot; all I knew is that a lot of the cards that I saw, that I was pulling for myself, were cards that my friend had pulled for me some months prior," Layne said. "I just saw...a repeat of some of those messages that I had gotten earlier in the year, [that said], yes, I'm supposed to be here. I was supposed to make that move. And that's that." 

Less than two weeks later, she got an audition for one of her first major roles as Tish Rivers in If Beale Street Could Talk.

Well, all these stories of our favorite celebs just go to show that sometimes, you just have to keep on going. That breakthrough of yours could just be right around the corner if you're willing to wait and keep working for it.

Seriously though, holding out like they did is no easy job and kudos to them for doing that or else, we'd be seeing other faces in some of our favorite shows and favorite characters which just kind of feels weird.

Liezel