Charlie Sheen Felt ‘Betrayal’ When Tom Cruise Got ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ Role

Charlie Sheen was caught off guard when he learned that Tom Cruise had been cast as Sergeant Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone’s 1989 Vietnam War movie, Born on the Fourth of July, instead of him.

On a recent episode of the In Depth with Graham Bensinger podcast, 60-year-old Sheen recounted how his brother, Emilio Estevez, broke the news to him that Cruise had been cast.

At that point, Sheen had already risen to fame with roles in several blockbuster films, including 1986’s Platoon and 1987’s Wall Street, which were both also directed by Stone.

Due to their working relationship and conversations he says he had with the director, he believed the role was his.

“Emilio, he calls me. He says, ‘Hey, man. You sitting down?’ And I think somebody died, right?” Sheen recounted on the Oct. 30 episode. “I’m like, ‘No, what’s going on?’ He says, ‘Cruise is doing Born on the Fourth.’ ”

“I love that Emilio thought that I needed to be seated to get news he thought was going to make me faint. I mean, what are we doing here? It’s a movie,” Sheen continued.

The film was based on the 1976 autobiography of Ron Kovic, a Vietnam War veteran who was wounded and paralyzed, later becoming an anti-war activist.

While Sheen understood it was just a role, he noted that there was still an element of “betrayal” at play.

“Well, it was also the betrayal factor of it,” the actor said. “So I was like, ‘Okay, all right.’ You know, Oliver’s been a fan of Tom’s for a long time. It’s a different movie if Tom does it than if I do it.”

Sheen added that he and Stone had “had meetings” about the movie, but then he “stopped hearing from him.”

“We stopped talking about it, and I reach out to Oliver, and I’m told that he’s in Cuba. Whatever,” he continued. “This is like 1988 or ’89, right? I’m like, ‘Okay, well, tell him I’m looking for him.'”

Ultimately, Stone went in a different direction.

“You can’t lose something you never had,” Sheen acknowledged. “I didn’t sign a contract. There was a handshake.”

Still, Sheen said he felt slighted enough that he confronted Stone about the situation later, after he had been drinking.

“I stopped in and he was there, and I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up,” Sheen recalled. “And he was like, ‘I just felt like you didn’t have any passion for it. I felt like you lost interest.’ I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t see you. How do you know how much passion I lost or interest that evaporated if we never talked about it again?’ ”

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Cruise would go on to deliver an Oscar-nominated performance in the film, which Sheen said made it easier to accept.

“It wasn’t like a thing where I’m going to talk s— about him, because then you see the movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, okay. All right. He turned it into that,'” Sheen said on the podcast.

“When someone gets a job and does that with it, you’re just like, of course,” he added. “You don’t sit there and dissect it and like, ‘I’d have done that better.’ No, go f— yourself. That’s a brilliant [performance] — and you should have won the freaking Oscar.”

Sheen’s memoir, The Book of Sheen, debuted Sept. 9, covering the first half of his life, including his unique childhood, his rise to fame in Hollywood and details on his well-documented struggles.