The future of the series could have been very different without Ahston Kutcher’s character as the protagonist
The famous series Two and a Half Men underwent a small transformation in 2011 after losing one of its stars. That year, Charlie Sheen left the series in which he had starred for eight years alongside actor Jon Cryer. CBS had to look for new candidates who could fill the gap that Sheen had left and, finally, Ashton Kutcher was chosen. Before him, The network was considering other names and a legendary British actor from the nineties had the opportunity to take the job..
“The deal was done, but he changed his mind”explains Cryer in So That Happenedhis memoir. The renowned actor valued to carry out the series was Hugh grant (Four Weddings and a Funeral), who was unsure about the project until the last moment. According to the book, Grant was the first choice to star in the fiction, but the actor did not know whether to trust the future of the production.
One day at nine in the morning, Cryer received a text message from Chuck Lorre, creator of the series, saying that Grant had accepted. At a quarter past eleven, he received a call informing him that the actor had finally rejected the role completely. He was only part of the series for two hours and fifteen minutes!
In 2016, the British actor visited The Howard Stern Show as part of the film’s promotional tour Florence Foster Jenkins and clarified why he rejected the offer: “The problem is that they did not have a script or a character already written.. They said, ‘Trust us, we’ll create one for you.’ I said, ‘Well, I know you guys are really talented. “I’ve seen the series, I like it and I think it’s brilliant, but I’m scared to join the project without having a script.”
This is how Angus T. Jones, the unforgettable (and now unrecognizable) boy from ‘Two and a Half Men’ who left Hollywood to focus on his faith in God, has changed
Grant assures that he does not regret making this decision. The actor firmly believes that the world will never know how the series would have worked if he had been in Kutcher’s place. “The series was still a good series, but The character they created for Ashton Kutcher was completely different from the one they would have created for me.“, he defends during the television program.
Finally, the series continued for four more years with Cryer and Kutcher as protagonists. The first of them is the only actor who has appeared in all 263 episodes of fiction, earning more than 600 thousand dollars per episode in the final seasons.
