Albert Brooks has turned down more successful movies than most people make in their whole careers

Outside of a rise in satin jacket sales and anti-Semitism, few have gotten as big a boost out of Drive as Albert Brooks, whose performance as a mobster whose viciousness mostly comes off as a sort of sustained grumpiness revealed that Brooks could do things besides neurotic comedy. And as it turns out, we all could have been having this conversation over a decade ago (unless some of you were like 8 years old then, in which case that would have been a pretty dumb conversation). In an interview with Collider—although he made these same revelations last month while talking to ABC News, but whatever—Brooks discusses turning down the part of porn director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, a role that similarly reinvented Burt Reynolds’ career, because he was “in pre-production of my own movie”—most likely Mother, a film that did the opposite of reinventing one’s career.

“I couldn’t stop,” Brooks says. “I couldn’t shut down what I was doing. But, regrets are stupid; they don’t mean anything and they don’t add up to anything.” Actually, were he to count his regrets by the box-office receipts of the movies he rejected, they would add up to quite a lot: Brooks says he also turned down the leads in Big, Dead Poets Society, and even Pretty Woman. Let us all now amuse ourselves by picturing Albert Brooks in a pair of patent leather thigh-high boots, and then quickly stop that, because that isn’t going to do any good for anybody.