Courtney Love Claims Her Rejection of Brad Pitt’s Kurt Cobain Film Got Her Booted From ‘Fight Club’

Brad Pitt’s ego cost Courtney Love a role in David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic film Fight Club, the Hole frontwoman claimed in a new interview with Marc Maron. As she recalled, Fincher had already hired her to play Marla Singer when Pitt, who was cast in the lead role of Tyler Durden, orchestrated her removal from the film after she rejected his pitch to play her late husband, Kurt Cobain, in a film.

“I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt,” Love said. “I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the fuck do you think you are?” At the time of both casting and filming for Fight Club in 1998, it had only been four years since Cobain had died at age 27 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He and Love had been married from 1992 until he died in 1994.

“I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit,” Love recalled telling Pitt. “They’re really good social justice movies, but…if you don’t get me, you kind of don’t get Kurt, and I don’t feel like you do, Brad.”

Love, who had been dating Fight Club star Edward Norton at the time, knew something was off when he came home crying out: “I don’t have the power.” Shortly after, she said, she received a call from Fincher telling her she had been cut from the film. She was later replaced by Helena Bonham Carter.

It’s been a source of regret for two decades for Love, who added: “I still kick myself for not having the shark instinct to be like, sure, and fuck them later.” As it turned out, at the time of their pitch, there was no actual film project in development. “I was so dumb.”

Van Sant went on to make Last Days, a drama inspired by Cobain that follows the final days of a fictional musician, in 2005. Love revealed that, for as much as she thinks Bonham Carter is a genius, she still hasn’t seen Fight Club to this day.

“My friend Cameron Crowe was like, and I don’t think he meant it as literally as it’s become, ‘Brad Pitt was put on this earth to stalk you for Kurt,’” Love added. “Which has been going on since ’96.”

From Rolling Stone US.