Michael Douglas was Fox's third choice for Gordon Gekko, and the studio said he was too young

The role that won Michael Douglas his acting Oscar was meant for two other stars before him, and the studio didn't want him for it. That is the account in his new memoir, One Helluva Ride, written with Shane Salerno and Deadline's Mike Fleming Jr. and published this week by Grand Central Publishing.

The Wall Street chapter, excerpted by Deadline, sets out the casting order. 20th Century Fox wanted Warren Beatty, who wouldn't commit. Richard Gere was offered the part and turned it down. Then Oliver Stone sent the script to Douglas.

Stone had just won Best Picture and Best Director for Platoon, and Wall Street was his first studio film, at three times Platoon's cost. He also let Charlie Sheen choose who would play Bud Fox's father. The choice came down to Jack Lemmon or Sheen's real father, Martin Sheen. Charlie picked his dad.

Fox's stated objection to Douglas was his age. According to the book, Scott Rudin and other Fox executives said he was too young, and warned Stone he was more of a producer than an actor.

The most famous line in the film is not the one people quote

"Greed is good" is how the line has been quoted for almost four decades. Gekko never says it in that form. The line in the film, which Douglas reproduces in the book, is "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good."

Douglas also traces where it came from. The line was drawn from a commencement speech Ivan Boesky gave at UC Berkeley's business school, in which he called greed healthy. The scene was shot six months after Boesky was arrested for insider trading. By the time Douglas said the line, the man behind it had already been arrested. The film's version became a slogan anyway.

Douglas says strangers still tell him Gekko is the reason they became stockbrokers. In 2012, 25 years after the film, the FBI recruited him for a public service announcement about financial fraud aimed at investment brokers.

The memoir doesn't agree with itself about the crowd

The "greed" monologue was shot in the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel on East 45th Street. It runs three and a half minutes, and Douglas writes that he did the whole speech in one go on the first take.

In one paragraph, the room holds "over a hundred" cast members and extras. A few lines later, the entire room of "five-hundred-plus people" rises to applaud him. Both numbers are in the same excerpt. Readers can choose which one to believe.

How Gekko was built

• The name: picked to suggest a cold-blooded predator, and a survivor.
• The suits: costume designer Ellen Mirojnick brought in Manhattan tailor Alan Flusser. They studied the power suits of Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens and a young Donald Trump.
• The hair: lifted from Lakers coach Pat Riley. Douglas denied it for years and only confessed in 2026, when the Lakers unveiled a statue of Riley outside Crypto.com Arena.
• The phone: a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. Douglas writes that Wall Street was the first major studio film to use one.
• The research: a composite of Boesky, Icahn, Dennis Levine, Asher Edelman and others. A meeting with Michael Milken ended when Stone asked to see the shredding machines.
• The schedule: filming began on April 15, 1987. Black Monday, when the Dow fell 22.6 percent, hit two months before the film opened on December 11, 1987.

An Oscar without a Best Picture nomination

Douglas won the Golden Globe, then the Academy Award for Best Actor. Marlee Matlin read his name over Jack Nicholson (Ironweed), Marcello Mastroianni (Dark Eyes), Robin Williams (Good Morning, Vietnam) and William Hurt (Broadcast News). By his own account, Wall Street was not nominated for Best Picture and Stone was not nominated for directing, because Fox had decided Broadcast News was its Oscar film that year.

The same night, Fatal Attraction was up for Best Picture, with nominations for director Adrian Lyne, Glenn Close, Anne Archer and screenwriter James Dearden. Douglas, its leading man, was the only one not nominated. He was nominated for the film Fox didn't campaign for.

The book says his father, Kirk Douglas, was nominated three times and lost every time. That is true of the competitive categories. In 1996, the Academy gave Kirk Douglas an honorary Oscar for 50 years as a moral and creative force in film.

What the excerpt leaves open

• Why Beatty wouldn't commit. The book only says he wouldn't.
• Why Gere said no. No reason is given.
• Which crowd figure is right. A hundred-plus, or five hundred-plus.

Fox wanted Beatty, then Gere, and told Stone that Douglas was too young. He won the Oscar. The line everyone remembers is one he never quite said.