Rob Huebel’s Lost Roles (Splitsider Interview)

Human Giant bud Rob Huebel did a great interview with Splitsider going over some lost roles from his career. Its all worth a read. For example, did you know Huebel auditioned to be Don Draper? The highlight though is this amazing story from his audition to join John McClane in the Die Hard series. 

Live Free or Die Hard (2007)

I went in for that one, and I was auditioning, my character was called “Pasty-Faced Hacker.” I think in the script, it was just, “Hacker,” but when they described my character, it was like “a nerdy, pasty-faced guy.” I was kind of pissed at my agent for sending me on that in the first place. I went in to audition for it, and it was just classic computer hacker guy who’s in a van somewhere outside of a building. It was a really tense conversation between me and Bruce Willis’s character John McClane. So, John McClane is like, “Can you hack it?” And I’m like typing on my keyboard, “Hold on just a second. Oh, there’s a firewall.” He’s like, “Can you get past the firewall?” “Give me just a second. A few more keystrokes, John. A couple more keystrokes.” And then, in the middle of my audition, the chair I was sitting on – it was like an old wooden chair – it just shattered and broke, and I fell down on the floor backwards. You know, my chair just exploded. And the casting director started laughing so hard, and everyone in the room was laughing. And I didn’t know what to do, so I just got up and I like kinda kept going. Kept hacking. Instead of like sitting down, I got up and I just kept hacking on my computer, and I improvised this line, “Damn it, they rigged my chair to blow. This whole building is gonna blow!” Something like that, and I didn’t get that part, I think because the chair fucked me over. But the cool thing was, they let me watch the footage of my audition. They never let you do that. The casting lady let me watch the audition footage, so you can see this part where I’m sitting there, hacking away, doing a great job, getting past all their firewalls, and then the chair explodes and I just fall down on the floor like a fat fuckin’ idiot. She was laughing so hard, there were just tears coming out of her face. It looked ridiculous.

Full interview here.