Jeffrey Dean Morgan Almost Played Mr. Brown in RESERVOIR DOGS Until Quentin Tarantino Cast Himself

Long before Jeffrey Dean Morgan was swinging Lucille as Negan on The Walking Dead, he was a young actor trying to land his next gig. One of those auditions put him in a room with Quentin Tarantino for Reservoir Dogs, and Morgan walked away convinced he had nailed it.

There was just one problem. The guy who ultimately got the role was Tarantino himself. Morgan recently shared the story while appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, revealing that he auditioned for Mr. Brown, one of the color-coded criminals involved in the diamond heist at the center of Tarantino’s 1992 crime movie.

And from Morgan’s perspective, the audition seemed to be going incredibly well. "I did the scene, and he was like Quentin, very excited, leaning forward in his chair, doing his whole thing.”

Anyone familiar with Tarantino’s interviews can probably picture exactly what Morgan is describing. The filmmaker gets animated when something grabs his attention, and apparently Morgan was getting plenty of that energy during his audition. Things became even more promising when Tarantino pulled him aside to work with him personally.

Morgan explained, "He pulled me into this tiny closet… He's giving me direction, he's real excited, and I’m thinking, 'Oh my god, I'm going to get this motherf*cker. I felt his excitement."

You can understand why Morgan thought the part was his. When the writer and director is enthusiastically giving you notes and taking extra time to work through the material, that's usually a pretty damn encouraging sign.

Then came the phone call. Morgan didn't get Mr. Brown. Tarantino had decided to play the character himself.

It's basically the Hollywood version of making it through an intense job interview only to discover the boss had an internal candidate in mind. Except in this case, the boss and the internal candidate were literally the same person.

Morgan recalled his reaction, saying, "I got the call that I wasn't going to be in it and it was Quentin doing it, I was just like, 'Oh.' Like, you can't get mad – what are you gonna do?"

Fair enough. Losing a role always has to sting, but it's probably a little easier to swallow when the filmmaker decides, "Actually, I'm just going to play this one."

Tarantino ultimately joined the killer cast he put together that included Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Steve Buscemi, Chris Penn, and Lawrence Tierney. His Mr. Brown doesn't exactly get the happiest ending, but Reservoir Dogs became the movie that introduced a lot of audiences to Tarantino’s filmmaking style and helped launch one hell of a career.

Tarantino would continue popping up in his own projects over the years, including Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, while Morgan certainly managed to recover from losing out on Reservoir Dogs.

He went on to build an impressive career of his own, eventually becoming a fan-favorite genre actor thanks to roles such as Negan in The Walking Dead, The Comedian in Watchmen, and John Winchester, father of Sam and Dean Winchester, in Supernatural.

So, yeah, things worked out pretty well for everybody involved. Still, you've got to wonder what Morgan's Mr. Brown would have looked like.

Knowing the presence he eventually brought to characters like Negan and The Comedian, it would have been fun to see a young Jeffrey Dean Morgan thrown into that warehouse with Mr. White, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde, and the rest of Tarantino's extremely dysfunctional criminal crew.