Kurt Russell should be taken off the list of Hollywood legends for this

If there's one thing we know about the alien known as The Thing (and, let's be honest, we don't know much about this workaholic changeling), it's that he's no stranger to any living creature if he can appear. In this spirit, it's no big deal that the role of Outpost 31's resident helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady could have been given to any number of actors when director John Carpenter made "The Thing" at Universal Pictures in the early '80s. On the other hand, this fact may surprise those who didn't realize that other actors were also in the running for the role, considering that the role ultimately went to one of Carpenter's inspirations: Kurt Russell. The marriage of Russell, Carpenter, and MacReady seems so natural in retrospect that it's absurd to think of anyone else playing the role.

Even more surprising was Carpenter's admission that Russell wasn't the first choice for MacReady. There may be a few reasons for this: Carpenter had worked with Russell just a year earlier, when the actor played Snake Plissken in "Escape from New York." In addition, the filmmaker was looking to expand his horizons as his career developed; let's not forget that most of the songs in "The Thing" were composed not by Carpenter, but by Ennio Morricone (though Carpenter himself provides a few uncredited cues). Regardless, Russell's competition for MacReady was not only an emerging group of unknowns, but also included some Hollywood veterans, some of whom would be interesting to see in the film.

Carpenter's "The Thing" is an absolute masterpiece by design, it's better to keep the audience uncertain not only about who will survive the ordeal, but about who is ultimately human. Thus, conventional wisdom would be to not cast any major stars in any of the roles, a principle followed by Carpenter when casting the film. Yet there's also the idea of ​​making people sit in their seats (something that, famously, "The Thing" did not do in its initial theatrical release), and that's the point where Carpenter and co-producer Stuart Cohen turned to MacReady to look at names for that role.

According to Cohen's blog post on the subject, there are leading men who have been pitched for MacReady: Jeff Bridges, Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken and Sam Shepard. While a quirky actor like Walken or a distinctive lively presence like Bridges (whom Carpenter would add to "Starman") would have been fantastic, they were apparently unavailable or limited due to the stylistic nature of the script. Now moving on to actors who are still moving forward in their careers, actors like John Heard, Ed Harris, Jack Thompson, Brian Dennehy, Tom Berenger, Fred Ward, Peter Coyote, Tim McIntire and Scott Glenn are considered. (Harris, who recently worked with another iconic horror filmmaker, George A. Romero, would be my second personal choice after Russell, given his incredible magnetic intensity.) Interestingly, Carpenter compares Russell to MacReady before considering another familiar face: Tom Atkins, with whom he worked on "The Fog" and "Escape from New York." Of course, Atkins managed to get the lead role in another Carpenter Universal production: "Halloween III: Season of the Witch."

In the end, Carpenter chose Russell, and the rest is history. Although he considered several other actors for the role, the director noted in a recent Guardian article how he and Russell crafted the character of MacReady (in a very Carpenterian way):