Justin Long has revealed that he almost missed out on a role in the beloved 2004 comedy Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, due to concerns about his age.
The actor, now 45, played gawky high school student Justin Redman in the film, opposite Vince Vaughn, Christine Taylor, Ben Stiller and Rip Torn.
However, Long was in his mid-twenties at the time, and has now admitted that he was “way too old” for the part.
Speaking on a recent episode of the Dinner’s On Me podcast, Long spoke about being cast in the comedy.
“It was because of [the NBC TV series] Ed that I got [Dodgeball] because it was an episode from Ed that the writer, Rosson, the writer/director saw, and he wrote this part for me,” Long revealed.
“The character’s name was Justin and… Ben and Vince Vaughn were two of my favorites. I so admired them. They were idols of mine, you know, and so it was such a fantasy and I was really nervous for the table read because I thought, ‘This part is mine to lose.’”
“And then the studio didn’t… there was pushback,” he added. “They wanted somebody younger because I was way too old to play that part. I was, like I said, 24, 25.”
However, he was ultimately cast in the role despite these reservations, and Dodgeball went on to become one of the most popular sports comedies in recent years.
In a contemporaneous review of Dodgeball, The Independent’s Nicholas Barber wrote: “To call Dodgeball laugh-a-minute would be to do it a disservice: it has as many laughs-per-minute as any comedy there is, up to and including The Simpsons.
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“Written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, it functions as a send-up of the sports-movie genre and a satire on body fascism. But its main concern is to be shamelessly silly, without, crucially, ever quite losing all contact with reality.
“The characters are just human enough for us to care about them, but not so human that we can't chuckle when they get hit in the face by a well-aimed monkey wrench.”
The prospect of a sequel has been floated for over a decade, with Long revealing in 2022 that Vaughn had come up with an idea for a continuation of the story.
While Vaughn is reportedly moving forward with the project, it is unclear at this point which of the other cast members would return.
