The bizarrely specific reason Robert Duvall refused to star in ‘Jaws’: “I turned down the lead”

Posted On October 24, 2025October 24, 2025

There aren’t many actors who can claim to have been in at least five of the greatest films ever made, but Robert Duvall‘s CV is probably unmatched in terms of sheer number of movies that you could genuinely place in the top 100.

And it seems as if starring in the likes of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, both parts of The Godfather, Network, Bullitt and True Grit weren’t enough, and Duvall could also have starred in another all-time great in the form of Steven Spielberg’s astonishing monster movie Jaws.

That film came along in 1975, when Duvall was without doubt one of the most in-demand actors in the world, having appeared in almost 20 films over the previous decade, going back as far as To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck in 1962. The lead character in Jaws is Chief Brody, the man desperately trying to keep the beach town of Amity Island safe under pressure as youngsters get munched left, right and centre.

In the end, it was played, and played superbly, by Roy Scheider, but originally Spielberg wanted Duvall to take the role, who, however, turned it down, as he told Ain’t It Cool News: “I turned down the lead in that movie… I wanted to play the other guy. I wanted to play the Portuguese fisherman [Robert Shaw’s role], but I was too young. We talked for, like, two hours, me and Spielberg. There’s a lot of Portuguese [influence] up there, so I wanted to play [the Quint role] Portuguese, but I was too young…but he [Shaw] ended up doing it well.”

Not that Duvall suffered by not being in the blockbuster, instead he did Network the following year, in addition to The Eagle Has Landed with Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland, the classic WW2 drama about a German plot to kidnap the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

But the contretemps between Spielberg and Duvall weren’t over with Jaws, and the actor was upset with the legendary director many decades later when he went to Cuba and spent time with Fidel Castro, which didn’t go down at all well with the conservative Duvall, who said, “Would you consider building a little annexe on the Holocaust museum, or at least across the street, to honour the dead Cubans that Castro killed? That’s very presumptuous of him to go there. I’ll tell him that. I’ll never work at DreamWorks again, but I don’t care about working there anyway.”

It’s unlikely either man lost too much sleep over the situation, given the success both of them have had since the 1970s. Duvall went on to make countless more films, many of which garnered huge critical and commercial success, including Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges, Michael Douglas’ Falling Down, and the 1988 police drama Colors with Sean Penn.

Spielberg, of course, took the success of Jaws and began a mainstream directing career that has placed him as one of, if not the greatest, filmmakers of all time with a string of astonishing movies including ET – the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. 

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