8 Actors Who Could Have Starred in ‘Jaws’

When Jaws—the film based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 shark attack novel of the same name—was released on June 20, 1975, it was a huge hit: the highest-grossing film ever to that point, in fact. It also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture and wins for Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound. The story of police chief Martin Brody teaming up with marine biologist Matt Hooper and brusque fisherman Quint transformed pop culture (and our opinions about sharks) forever. But, those roles—which were played by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, respectively—almost went to different actors. Here are a few actors who could have been in Jaws instead.

1. Charlton Heston
2. Robert Duvall
3. Jon Voight
4. Jeff Bridges
5. Timothy Bottoms
6. Joel Grey
7. Lee Marvin
8. Sterling Hayden
9. Bonus: Peter Benchley’s Picks (Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen)

Charlton Heston

It’s no secret that Charlton Heston went after the part of Amity police chief Brody. By the time Jaws was being cast, Heston had had a storied career. He’d played Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments in 1956, and won a Best Actor Oscar in 1960 for Ben-Hur. Director Steven Spielberg turned Heston down because he believed Heston was a distractingly big star, and one known for playing heroic characters so audiences would be sure he’d win the day. This apparently sparked a one-sided grudge: It’s said that Spielberg reached out to Heston for a role in 1941, and Heston said no.

Robert Duvall

With Heston a no-go, Spielberg asked Robert Duvall to play Brody. Duvall, however, wanted a role in which he could go bigger—he’d already played the more subdued Tom Hagen in two Godfather films, receiving an Academy Award nomination for his work in the first. So he asked if he could be Quint instead. Spielberg rejected him, but later acknowledged that Duvall would have been a capable Quint.

Jon Voight

Richard Dreyfuss wasn’t initially Spielberg’s top choice for Matt Hooper: He first offered the role to Jon Voight. The acclaimed actor, who was in his mid-thirties at the time, had been appearing in films since 1967; they included starring roles in films like Catch-22 and Deliverance, plus his Academy Award-nominated performance in Midnight Cowboy as naïve sex worker Joe Buck. Voight turned the part down.

Jeff Bridges

Spielberg loved Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 coming-of-age film The Last Picture Show. As he put it, “I was going after everyone in the cast from that film.” That “everyone” included Jeff Bridges, whom Spielberg wanted for the Hooper role. Bridges grew up around acting—he’s the son of film and television actor Lloyd Bridges, and appeared in his father’s show Sea Hunt when he was 8 years old. But he didn’t have his true big break until he played Duane Jackson in The Last Picture Show, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. And though he didn’t end up being Hooper, his career continued soaring. He was nominated for another Oscar in 1975 for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and continues to make hit films to this day.

Timothy Bottoms

Timothy Bottoms was also considered for Hooper; according to Spielberg’s recollection, they interviewed the actor for the part but didn’t cast him (or Bridges) because “we got turned down or they weren’t available.” Bottoms was newer to the Hollywood scene compared to Voight and Bridges: He had his big breakout year in 1971, playing Joe Bonham in Johnny Got His Gun and Sonny Crawford in The Last Picture Show. In 1974, he played Daggett in Philip Kaufman’s The White Dawn about three survivors of a mishap on a whaling journey.

Joel Grey

Spielberg considered Joel Grey for Hooper as well. He was best known as the master of ceremonies in the musical Cabaret, first on stage in 1966 and then in the 1972 film adaptation for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. That award season, he also won a Golden Globe Award and a BAFTA Award for most promising newcomer. It’s unclear why Grey didn’t end up in Jaws, but he continued a successful ’70s, alternating between film and Broadway. The same year Jaws came out, Grey was nominated for a Tony for his work in the musical Goodtime Charley.

It was actually Spielberg’s friend George Lucas who eventually recommended Richard Dreyfuss for the Hooper role because they had worked together on American Graffiti. Dreyfuss wasn’t sure at first—he apparently said no twice before Spielberg convinced him to take the part. 

Lee Marvin

Marvin was at the top of Spielberg’s list for the role of Quint. Marvin got his break in television in the early 1950s and built his career playing complex, tough-guy characters. He won an Academy Award for the 1965 film Cat Ballou in which he played two gunslinging brothers. When Quint was offered to Marvin, he responded, “I’m going to do some real fishing.” And he did, indeed, then go on a fishing trip. In a 2023 interview, Spielberg explained, “He took his fishing very seriously and didn’t want to do it from a ‘movie’ boat.”

Sterling Hayden

Spielberg’s second choice for Quint was Sterling Hayden, who had acted in films starting in the 1940s and was in his late fifties by the time of Jaws’s production. Spielberg was a fan of Hayden’s work with Stanley Kubrick, both The Killing and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The director also saw Hayden’s 1958 film Terror in a Texas Town in which the actor played a whaler; Spielberg said the actor “had an Ahab quality about him.” He was absolutely correct about Hayden’s affinity for water—the actor spent much of his time living on his sailboat. Spielberg said he didn’t remember why Hayden turned the part down, but that may be the director just being polite because other sources (including the American Film Institute and On Location … On Martha’s Vineyard: The Making of the Movie Jaws) claim Sterling Hayden was in hot water with the IRS at the time, so he wasn’t allowed out of California.

Bonus: Peter Benchley’s Picks (Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Steve McQueen)

Jaws author Peter Benchley once told Empire, “When the producers first asked me who I thought should be in it, I said Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Steve McQueen. It turned out they didn’t need any stars.” He was right that those suggestions would have ramped up the star power. By this point, Paul Newman and Robert Redford had already appeared together in 1969’s hugely popular Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and 1973’s The Sting, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Steve McQueen had earned an Oscar nomination for his work in the 1966 war epic The Sand Pebbles. And McQueen had hits throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with films like Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, and The Towering Inferno. But Benchley was certainly correct in saying that Jaws didn’t need any stars: It became a star-maker in its own right.

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