As quoted in Entertainment Weekly, after host Josh Horowitz asked Cusack about a different rumor that he had turned down a role in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (he did not), Cusack said of the long-standing piece of casting lore: “Some of those things are so weird, because there was this whole riff that I had turned down Walter White. And I never ever remembered that, and I was like, did that happen and I blacked it out? Did I lose time?”
Thankfully, Cusack ran into none other than the show’s creator after the show premiered in order to reaffirm his (lack of) memory about the supposed rejection of one of the most legendary roles in TV history. “I met Vince Gilligan in New York, and I was like, ‘Hey, man, I love your show, it’s awesome. I gotta know, everyone is saying you offered me that—did you offer me that?,’ Cusack asked the multiple Emmy winner. “He was like, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘Thank you, Vince!'”
That enthusiasm might seem out of place for a guy rumored to have been on the short list for such an acclaimed role, but Cusack is effusive that nobody else could have played Walter White. “People say, ‘Oh, would you regret doing that?’ I was like, ‘How could you regret Bryan Cranston playing that role? It was meant to be his.'”
Speaking of other rumored Walter Whites, while other supposed also-ran Matthew Broderick hasn’t commented on just how close he came to the role (Wikipedia still states confidently that both Broderick and Cusack turned White down), Cusack, oddly, did tell Horowitz that Broderick is the only other actor he’s ever been mistaken for in public.
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