Why Justin Timberlake didn’t star in The Death of Dick Long

The Death of Dick Long isn’t exactly what viewers might expect, judging from the mild innuendo of the title and the trailer portraying it as a comedically dark disaster about a boys’ night out that goes wrong. It’s also not necessarily what viewers might expect based on its creators, director Daniel Scheinert and his longtime friend and collaborator, screenwriter Billy Chew. As half of the writing-directing team Daniels, Scheinert has been involved in a lot of giddy mayhem, from colorful music videos (most notably for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What”) to bizarre, exciting short films. They’ve created complicated experiments in interactive cinema, and they made their feature-film debut with Swiss Army Man, a strangely tender movie about a shipwrecked man who survives with the help of Daniel Radcliffe’s aggressively farting corpse.

So it’s surprising how empathetic and personal The Death of Dick Long is, for a noir crime comedy about a man who dies with mysterious anal injuries, leaving his friends to frantically cover up the circumstances.

Is it true that you pursued a lot of stunt casting for Dick Long himself?

Yeah, we actually reached out to Channing Tatum and Justin Timberlake’s PR teams. And I feel bad in retrospect. I’m so lucky to be in a position where I can reach out to people like that, but this was a pretty mean role to offer someone. [Laughs] Especially now that I’ve played the role. It would have been miserable. I mean, it was fun. Dick gets to shoot fireworks and guns, but then he gets dragged around and dropped on concrete and covered in fake blood for a long time. They wouldn’t have had much fun. But I think Justin Timberlake’s team — we got in touch with his agents, and they were like, “We’re not even showing this to him”. Which has never happened to me, where an agent was like, “No. Hard pass. We’re not even telling Justin”. Maybe they were afraid he’d say yes, and they censored him!

What would you do if Channing Tatum or Justin Timberlake approached you at a film festival and said “I can’t believe they didn’t tell me about this role. I wish I’d been Dick Long!”

I’d be like, “Let’s do another one! Next time! I’ll find a role for you!” But I’m glad it didn’t work out. I love that nobody in this film is a celebrity, like a big, super-distracting, famous face. Because there’s a whole genre of indie film that makes me feel like I just went into a small-town world, and I hope this movie’s like that, like a window into a community. Like Beasts of the Southern Wild, or Moonlight. Sundance has like 10 indies every year that are like, “Here are 10 super-celebrities playing a small-town Arkansas family”. Like Kings of Summer. It’s a good movie, but everybody’s parents are so famous in that movie, it kind of distracted me. And this isn’t that.

The Verge