Corey Feldman says Johnny Depp got him fired from What's Eating Gilbert Grape

“He was cast after I was, and apparently whispered into the producers’ ear that he wasn’t fond of me, and thought—he said that I was a junkie and that he didn’t work with junkies. And this is the first time I’ve ever telling this story, so I’m sure I’m gonna get hung by this one,” Feldman revealed (via Variety). “I had just gotten sober. I had just gotten out of rehab. I had turned my life around, and, in fact, was trying to help River [Phoenix] at the time, who [Depp] was running with at the time, as we all know. As you can imagine, there was a bit of a thorn in the side on that one. And, had I not been pushed out and done that role, who knows what would have happened from that point forward.”

DiCaprio, of course, went on to a lauded film career that continues to this day; Feldman, who was a major star of the ’80s, saw his mainstream film career taper off in the ’90s. (Depp, meanwhile, has gone on to have his own tumultuous career.) “There was a bitter tea there. But that said, you don’t hang on those, you get past ’em,” he said of Gilbert Grape. He also claimed that he “got pretty close” to being cast as Samwise Gamgee in Lord Of The Rings (a role which went to his Goonies co-star Sean Astin) and that he was up for Titanic against DiCaprio a few years after Gilbert Grape. “But that was OK, because that one I wasn’t as close,” he said. “I was up for it, I read for it, I know that I was in the contention somewhere.”