Jamie Dornan was almost cast as Nathan Drake in the Uncharted film. The 41-year-old actor revealed how close he came to playing the iconic adventurer after taking part in a screen test for the film a few years earlier.
“I remember I did a screen test for Uncharted years ago when they were going to make it with a different director,” Dornan explained during an interview on The Happy Sad Confused podcast. He said the screen test “went well and there was a point where it looked like maybe I was doing it.”
Sadly, as history informs us, Dornan did not get the part. Away from Uncharted, the Irish actor has carved out a successful career in television and film. He shared the screen with Kenneth Branagh in Belfast, played a serial killer in the superb BBC Two drama The Fall and more recently, portrayed an amnesiac in the Australian outback in The Tourist.
The audition process for Uncharted soon reached an abrupt halt. “It all went quiet and went away – the director fell off” Dornan said, which spelled the end of his time as a Nathan Drake candidate. “When I heard they were going to make it again I was like, ‘Oh, great’ but you’re too old now. Tom Holland, who is half your age, is doing it,” Dornan later added.
In the end, Tom Holland’s take on the Uncharted character led the film adaptation, which debuted in cinemas last year, to gross more than $400 million at the box office, with Sony strongly considering making a sequel.
As reviewed by FlickLuster, Uncharted was described as “a frantic, fun, and breathless big-screen experience of Naughty Dog’s acclaimed franchise, and serves as a decent launching point for a sequel if green-lit.”
Uncharted further stars Sophia Ali, Rudy Pankow, Tati Gabrielle, Antonio Banderas, Steve Waddington, Pilou Asbæk, and Nolan North.
