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Courtney Love is claiming she would have played Marla Singer in Fight Club if it weren’t for Brad Pitt.
In a recent interview on WTF With Marc Maron, Love said director David Fincher had hired her to star opposite Pitt and Edward Norton in the cult classic film, but she says she got fired after she rejected a pitch Pitt brought to her.
Love recalls that the actor had asked her if he could play her late husband, Kurt Cobain, in a Gus Van Sant project, and she said she turned him down. “I wouldn’t let Brad play Kurt,” she said on the podcast. “I went nuclear. I don’t do Faust. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
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She went on to recount the conversation the two of them had, saying, she told him, “I don’t know if I trust you, and I don’t know that your movies are for profit. 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 said that after she rejected the idea of Pitt playing Cobain, she was fired from Fight Club, and the role of Marla went to Helena Bonham Carter. Norton, with whom Love was romantically involved at the time, broke the news to her, she explained, saying he started sobbing. “He was like, ‘I don’t have the power!’” she recalled.
A source close to the film tells The Hollywood Reporter, however, that Love only auditioned for the role, “a role she was never offered at any point.” The source adds, “You cannot be fired for a job you didn’t get. It’s common knowledge that roles are not decided by other actors but by the director.”
Van Sant eventually helmed the Cobain-inspired film, Last Days, starring Michael Pitt, but Love said that wasn’t the film they originally spoke about.
On Friday, Love took to Instagram to share more about her interactions with Pitt around Fight Club and another potential Cobain biopic.
She indicated it’s not so much that she’s upset she didn’t play Marla in Fight Club but that she doesn’t like “the way [Pitt] does business or wields his power.”
“I understand how much of a game of roulette casting is. I am not here 22 years later bitching about losing a part playing someone’s side piece in a movie,” Love wrote. “On the podcast, I recount the day Brad & Gus Van Sant called me from lunch and tried to blackmail me over my role, for the rights to a film about Kurt. I lost my shit on them, and by 7pm I was fired from Fight Club. Every word of this is factual. This was always a secret that I was fine keeping.”
Later she adds, “I’m sure Helena Bonham Carter was utterly meant to be Marla Singer and I do not bear her or Edward Norton or David Fincher or Art Linson — all people whose work & genius I respect immensely — any ill will.”
But she says Pitt kept after her about a Cobain film: “The point is Brad kept on stalking me about Kurt.”
“It’s not just the Zoom I had with Brad in 2020 where I said no to @planbfilms & Brad producing it. It’s that I said NO on the Zoom and that was not enough, and I was not heard. I was ignored,” Love wrote. “I told the story because I felt Pitt would not stop pursuing Kurt — unless I said it in public.”
A representative for Pitt declined to comment on Love’s claims.
Dec. 30, 8:40 a.m. This story has been updated to include information from a source close to the film.
Dec. 30, 1:15 p.m. This story has been updated with Love’s Instagram post.
Dec. 30, 4:11 p.m. This story has been updated with Pitt’s rep declining to comment.
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