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Demi Moore recounts failed Top Gun audition: ‘I got nervous’

Actor was originally in line to play lead role opposite Tom Cruise

Jacob Stolworthy
Friday 11 October 2019 09:52 BST
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Top Gun Trailer (1986)

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Demi Moore has revealed she regrets failing to secure the lead role opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

The actor was in the running to play Charlotte Blackwood in the 1980s blockbuster, but the role eventually went to Kelly McGillis after a bad audition.

Moore told Howard Stern on his SiriusXM radio show: “I think it was just the timing of things. I think the first audition was great and the screen test, I shanked, I got in my head.

The actor, who went on to find stardom thanks to appearances in Ghost and Indecent Proposal, said: “I just got nervous and I didn’t own it.

“But in my beating myself up, it then just reinforced the idea that I didn’t think I was good enough,“ she added

Moore went on to star with Cruise in 1992 drama A Few Good Men.

In the same interview, Moore discussed the rape she suffered as a teenager. In her newly released memoir, Inside Out, the actor said she was 15 when she was attacked by a friend of her mother’s.

She said: “I felt trapped, I didn’t want [it] and I was clear that I didn’t. I felt like it was my fault. I felt like I had behaved in a way that was mature like I really knew a lot. I never really looked at myself as being a kid. I never looked at it as rape.”

She added: “I saw it as unfortunate, I was very embarrassed by it.”

Additional reporting by Agencies.

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