Charlie Sheen opted against staying at the Beverly Hilton the night before his 9 a.m. "Anger Management" panel July 28. When he didn't arrive first thing Sunday morning, FX execs were said to be in panic mode. But Sheen showed up in the nick of time -- as he so often does -- wearing plaid shorts and house slippers.
This past summer, Andrew Garfield became the second star actor in the past five years to play Spider-Man on the big screen, taking over the webslinger role from Tobey Maguire. If you think that was a big transition, just imagine a spider-legacy that includes Charlie Sheen.
It almost happened.
“I had an office at Orion at the time, and I brought them Spider-Man,” Sheen told Jay Mohr on the new episode of his podcast, Mohr Stories. “I said, ‘Look, in a couple of years, I’ll be too old to play Peter Parker.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we’re just thinking that cartoons are not the future, comic books are not the future.’ And I said, ‘But it’s Spider-Man, I’m perfect.’ And they were like, ‘Nah, we’re gonna wait.'”
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As for whether he had the rights to the character, Sheen said that wasn’t a concern.
“I had a guy in my pocket who was going to get them for me,” he assured Mohr. And regarding the lack of foresight by Orion — which would slip into bankruptcy a few years later — Sheen said, “They didn’t know shit.”
Outside of the Christopher Reeve‘s Superman series, the ’70s and ’80s were quite light on comic book fare, with the 1989 Tim Burton Batman film ultimately responsible for kicking off the first real wave of comic films. There was a short-lived Spider-Man TV series, which ran for 13 episodes between 1977-79. Nicholas Hammond played Peter Parker.
Of course, years after Sheen pitched himself as Parker, his father, Martin Sheen, played the character’s Uncle Ben in the 2012 reboot.
