Why Michael Jackson’s Audition For Edward Scissorhands Failed to Impress?
Having already conquered music, with the best-selling album of all time, millions of adoring fans, and being the highest paid entertainer in the world by the late 1980s. You’d think if Michael Jackson then decided to throw in the towel and focus all his efforts into a movie career, that Hollywood would be there with open arms to embrace him. As surely any big-budget production starring Michael Jackson would have attracted an incredible level of public interest and media attention. However, the gloved one wasn’t your typical leading man. His Peter Pan persona, off-the-wall antics and forays into plastic surgery made Michael unsuitable for most roles being touted in Hollywood at the time. Could you envisage Michael Jackson playing a Tom Cruise all American action hero, or being a believable love interest for a Meg Ryan rom com?
Although a challenge, Michael Jackson believed he found a role that was made for him and had the potential to launch him onto the silver screen as a major talent. The tale, conjured up by director Tim Burton, focused on a wounded and vulnerable young man with scissors instead of hands. Once he caught wind of the script titled ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and that every major star in Hollywood was being considered for its lead role, Michael Jackson lobbied hard for it. However, Tim Burton completely dismissed his attempts and wouldn’t even take a meeting with the superstar. Eventually offering the role to a relatively unknown Johnny Depp. ‘Edward Scissorhands’ would become one of the actor’s most memorable roles, and much like Michael hoped it would do for him, launched a movie career that led to Johnny Depp becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars ever since.
After finding major box-office success taking Pee-wee on an adventure, conjuring up the ghost of Beetlejuice, and exploring Batman’s Gotham City, Tim Burton had quickly become one of Hollywood’s most sort after A-list directors. He therefore could essentially do whatever he liked creatively, and rather than fast track ‘Batman Returns’ or ‘Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian’, he decided to prioritise a story that was very close to his heart. Inspired by his childhood upbringing in suburban Burbank, California, the genesis of ‘Edward Scissorhands’ came from a drawing by the director when he was a teenager, which reflected his feelings of isolation and being unable to communicate to people around him. The drawing depicted a thin, solemn man with long, sharp blades for fingers. Burton stated that he was often alone and had trouble retaining friendships. “I get the feeling people just got this urge to want to leave me alone for some reason, I don’t know exactly why.”
During pre-production on Beetlejuice, screenwriter Caroline Thompson was hired to adapt Burton’s story into a screenplay. “Every detail was so important to Tim because it was so personal”, Thompson remarked. She wrote Scissorhands as a ‘love poem’ to Burton, calling him “the most articulate person I know, but couldn’t put a single sentence together”. Fox agreed to finance Thompson’s screenplay while giving Burton complete creative control. Burton originally wanted to make Scissorhands as a musical, feeling “it seemed big and operatic to me”. An aspect of the film that would lend its lead having a musical background, this further stirring Michael Jackson’s interest in the role. When in development in early 1990, Michael Jackson had already declared his departure from music to pursue a movie career after completing his Bad World Tour in early 1989.
Although he had already made his acting debut in the 1978 musical ‘The Wiz’, his career as an actor was always overshadowed by his immense success in music. Jackson then spearheaded critically acclaimed short films for his songs like ‘Thriller’, which he even lobbied for consideration at the Oscars, this followed by the Disney sci-fi short film ‘Captain EO’, and the experimental anthology musical ‘Moonwalker’. Despite this, Michael Jackson failed to stand out for his acting skills and none of these attempts succeeded in launching his movie career in any serious way. The King of Pop was drawn to Tim Burton’s distinctive gothic fantasy style, odd-ball characterisations, and felt he was better suited for the more cutting-edge Burton film aesthetic, rather than what you would see in a Spielberg or Attenborough production. ‘Scissorhands’ screenwriter, Caroline Thompson, believes Michael Jackson pursued the director heavily, but Burton didn’t pay attention to his requests and never met with the artist as he didn’t feel he was the right fit for the role, even though the superstar had been dressing like his title character for years now. “I imagine Michael Jackson wanted to do it. I imagine he pursued Tim. Tim didn’t pursue him.”
Actors Tim Burton agreed to meet with were popular names like Tom Cruise, who Burton admitted wasn’t his ideal but was still open to talk. Cruise ended up asking too many questions and for a happier ending, “as long as at the end the hero grows hands and becomes cute”, so Burton and company moved on. Tom Hanks and Gary Oldman were offered the role of Edward Scissorhands, but Hanks turned it down in favor of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’, and Oldman rejected the offer because he thought the story was absurd. Jim Carrey was also considered to play the role and John Cusack was Thompson’s favorite. But ultimately unlike Jackson and the other contenders, Burton wanted somebody more unknown.
Having already cast Winona Ryder to play Edward’s love interest, the director was intrigued by her real-life fiancé, actor Johnny Depp. Although Burton was unfamiliar with Depp’s work, he was intrigued by the young actor’s career path. As after four seasons playing a macho TV role in ’21 Jump Street’ that transformed him into a teenage heartthrob, Depp did a 180-degree turn, taking the lead role in a John Waters production, ‘Cry Baby’, and was looking for more alternative roles as a path into the movie business. When he was sent the script, Depp “wept like a new-born” and immediately found personal and emotional connections with the story. Once Burton met the actor, he says he was impressed with Depp’s subtlety and ability to ‘act with his eyes’, and quickly became Burton’s first choice for the title role. Edward Scissorhands wasn’t a character with a lot of dialogue, only saying 150 words throughout the whole film, so whoever played him needed to rely on body language and facial expressions to incite sympathy and to express the character’s emotions. A perfect role for the shy Michael, who was not known for his way with words. In preparation for the role, Depp watched silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin, another movie icon of Jackson’s, to study the idea of creating sympathy without dialogue.
The film tells the story of a humanoid created by a lonely inventor who passed away before he could finish him, leaving Edward in isolation with big scissors and razors instead of hands. After being found at his gothic castle on top a hill Edward was taken down to the local suburban neighbourhood. Members of the community initially feared Edward’s presence, while others were curious. He ultimately won over housewives and their husbands with his elaborate hedge pruning and talent for Avant Garde hairdressing. He also found love and compassion from the family who took him in, and feelings developed between him and their teenage daughter, Kim, before the community turned against Edward after a series of misunderstandings. Finding refuge back in his castle, a mob confronts the “evil creature”. Edward then attempts to protect Kim from an ex-boyfriend, which resulted in his stabbing and ultimate death. Unable to consummate his love for Kim due to his physicality, he accepts that their love can never be fulfilled and retreats back into a life of isolation. Scriptwriter Caroline Thompson reflecting, “I knew that I wanted to write about being in the world, and the whole world loves you, and then you don’t do what the world wants you to do, and they all turn against you. That’s what I knew going in.”
Burton acknowledged that the main themes of Edward Scissorhands deal with self-discovery and isolation, and its narrative shared many parallels with the life of Michael Jackson. The wounded loner perched on a hillside for all to observe, yet still very much out of touch from the rest of society. Edward’s scissor-hands could be seen as a metaphor for Michael Jackson’s relationship with superfame, something that mesmerised and drew people to him out of curiosity, but at the same time acted as a barrier and kept people from treating him like any other human being. Edward’s physical scars is evidence of how he would unintentionally hurt himself and those around him due to his inability to navigate what can be seen as a blessing as well as a curse. Burton explained that his depiction of suburbia was “not a bad place. It’s a weird place. I tried to walk the fine line of making it funny and strange without it being judgmental.” Perceived as mundane for many Americans, suburban life is portrayed as though through the eyes of Edward as a surreal, unfamiliar place. Much like Michael Jackson who wore disguises and shut down supermarkets in order to cosplay a ‘normal’ existence, Edward attempts to assimilate into this alien landscape that intrigues him after years away from wider society.
Much like Jackson, Edward Scissorhands is celebrated for his talents, but at the same time is manipulated and isolated from others because of them. His inability to explain himself or to be listened to, means that he is at the mercy of labels and assumptions made by others, whose opinions dictated how he would be treated. The movie follows many tropes found in the traditions of fairy tale and other films that Michael Jackson greatly admired, for example Steven Spielberg’s ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ and David Lynch’s ‘The Elephant Man’, (more on Michael’s obsession with the Elephant man and buying his bones in our video linked in the description below). Whose plotlines largely follow an outsider’s pursuit for compassion and acceptance from wider society as a whole, something Jackson could very much relate to.
When ‘Edward Scissorhands’ was released in December 1990, Michael Jackson loved its final outcome. On top of that, the singer reportedly paid $5,300 to buy a pair of gloves that Johnny Depp wore to play the title character and added it to his large collection of movie memorabilia. Although he missed out this time, Michael attempted to cement his success in the movies through his new multi-media contract with Sony in 1991, reportedly worth over a billion dollars. Aside from the music of course, there was a particular focus placed on developing his acting career, with Columbia Pictures under way to produce Jackson’s first full length musical action-adventure feature. Caroline Thompson was even asked to write the script, Thompson revealing that the sole reason why Jackson hired her to work on it was because she wrote the script for ‘Scissorhands’. She would go on to write the screenplays for family classics like, ‘The Addams Family’ and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’. The project she developed with Michael in mind had the working title, ‘MidKnight’. Thompson since revealing, “I think the reason we decided to do a story about a knight was that a knight usually wears a helmet mask and we wanted to cover up Michael’s face because we thought a film audience wouldn’t take him seriously as an actor.” Giving some insight into Hollywood’s enthusiasm at the thought of Michael Jackson pursuing a movie career.
By the 1990s, Michael Jackson’s tabloid image was plaguing his career. Although outwardly one would imagine if you achieved the position Jackson held, it meant that you could command anything you want in the entertainment industry, but this was simply not the case. Much like in ‘Edward Scissorhands’, Michael was very much at the whim of how others perceived him. As Thompson reflected, “I was an admirer of him as a child, and as he aged and went on his weirdy journey, I just thought, how can this be a human being? It’s hard for any of us to imagine what it must be like to be someone who can’t go out of their house without being mobbed. He described to us how he would get in disguises and go out into the world, that was one of his greatest joys. I can’t say he made me feel sad, but it was close to that.”
Oddly enough the premise of ‘Edward Scissorhands’, it being about isolation caused by the preconceptions of others, is precisely why Michael was rejected from playing the role in the first place. His immense fame and wacko-jacko public image otherised him and made it nearly impossible for audiences to relate to him or see the artist as anything other than superstar Michael Jackson. As indicated when Burton reminisced what it was like meeting actor Johnny Depp for the first time, “I connected with him when I met him for Edward Scissorhands: he was similar to me, kind of suburban white trash. It was not even a verbal understanding. It was something I could feel.” Based on how Burton described the connection he instantly experienced with Depp, it’s clear that Burton wanted to cast an actor with a relatable background, and not many can relate to becoming an overnight Motown childhood prodigy.
In his self-produced 1996 short film, ‘Ghosts’, that drew heavily from his own life experience and the ‘Scissorhands’ narrative. An eccentric man with supernatural powers is locked in a haunted mansion, that the local small town’s people and judgmental mayor brand a ‘freak’ and attempt to force out. ‘Ghosts’ first iteration began production in 1993 under the title ‘Is it Scary?’. It was planned for release in conjunction with the family comedy film, ‘Addams Family Values’. However, Jackson later backed out of the deal and readapted the video concept. Making the most expensive music video ever made, at around 15 million dollars, all paid for by the artist. Michael Jackson’s otherworldly talents, unmatched popularity, and success caused him to live a life much like the existence of Burton’s creation and yet he was never able to play Edward Scissorhands on screen, he remained the closest embodiment of the character in real life. As much as he wanted to prove his abilities in the realm of acting, it appears that one of the King of Pop’s primary motivations was to also tell the story of his life as he saw it. In hopes of being understood in a world he felt often misrepresented by.