Courtney Love said she would’ve played Marla Singer in Fight Club if it weren’t for Brad Pitt.
In a recent interview on WTF with Marc Maron, Love said director David Fincher had hired her to star opposite Pitt and Edward Norton in the cult classic film, but she got fired after she rejected a pitch Pitt brought to her.
The actor had asked Love if he could play her late husband, Kurt Cobain, in a Gus Van Sant project, and she said she turned him down. “I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt,” she said on the podcast. “I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
She went on to recount the conversation the two of them had, saying, she told him, “I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit. They’re really good social justice movies, but … if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad.”
Love said that after she rejected the idea of Pitt playing Cobain, she was fired from Fight Club, and the role of Marla went to Helena Bonham Carter. Norton, who Love was romantically involved with at the time, broke the news to her, she explained, saying he started sobbing. “He was like, ‘I don’t have the power!’” she recalled.
Van Sant eventually helmed the Cobain-inspired film, Last Days, starring Michael Pitt, but Love said that wasn’t the film they originally spoke about.
The Hollywood Reporter reached out to a rep for Pitt but had not heard back at the time of publication.