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How Jurassic Park’s Joseph Mazzello lost his big break with Hook, because he was "too sweet-looking" for Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman told Joseph Mazzello he was “too sweet” to be in Hook, so Steven Spielberg put him in Jurassic Park as a consolation prize
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Sometimes you don’t get the role you want, but that’s okay because you can still play with dinosaurs.
Okay, maybe that is a very specific situation, but it applies to Joseph Mazzello. When Mazzello was a young boy, he was up for the role of Robin Williams’s son in Hook. Mazzello was Spielberg’s choice for the role, so it looked like he had it in the bag, However, Dustin Hoffman had some reservations.
“Steven [Spielberg] was really good friends with Richard Donner, and I was doing a movie called Radio Flyer, and it was on the same stage that they were building the sets for Hook,” Mazzello says during a panel at GalaxyCon Raleigh 2025. “Steven would come around, and Steven really wanted me to play the little boy in Hook. So, I did a screen test with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams and Steven. Dustin just felt like I was a little too young, a little too sweet looking, and it was going to make him look like too much of a villain. And he wanted Hook to be kind of a fun villain.”
The role went to Charlie Korsmo, but Spielberg wasn’t done with Mazzello.
“Steven came up to me and said, ‘Don’t worry Joey, I’m going to get you in a movie this summer.’ And that movie ended up being Jurassic Park. So, that was the best job I never got. I love Hook, but Jurassic was like a whole other beast. He actually switched the roles. In the book the son is older than the daughter. So, he switched it so I could be in it.”
In retrospect, Dustin Hoffman calling him “sweet looking” might’ve been one of the best things to ever happen to him.
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