Although Ryan took much of the blame at the time, Peter is now chalking up the mismatch to chemistry. 

"Ryan is a fantastic actor, as we know,” the King Kong filmmaker emphasized. “Films are a chemistry both on camera and behind the camera. They're chemistry in terms of what the actor conveys to the audience of the film. It's just a complicated sort of amalgam of communication of how somebody gels into a group of people, into a story, into a character.”

He added, “It's complicated and usually you try very hard when you're planning the film, casting it, trying to get that gel kind of right, but occasionally we make our own mistakes."

Ryan previously admitted that the two didn’t see eye-to-eye when it came to the character. He explained that he gained weight for the role, slurping down melted pints of Haagen Dazs ice cream, because he believed the father should be larger than he was. 

“We had a different idea of how the character should look,” the Barbie actor told The Hollywood Reporter in 2010. “I really believed he should be 210 pounds.”

But it wasn’t just the appearance change that was the issue, as the Project Hail Mary star admitted that the disconnect between their ideas suggested a bigger concern. 

“We didn’t talk very much during the preproduction process, which was the problem,” he continued. “It was a huge movie, and there’s so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong.”

Read on to check out more famous roles that nearly went to other stars…