Jumping from one role to another, especially after playing a character for a 13-episode season, could be understandably difficult for an actor. For Daredevil‘s Charlie Cox, shaking off habits developed while playing blind lawyer Matt Murdock may have hurt him while auditioning for other roles.

Cox is portaying six characters in an off-Broadway play titled Incognito this summer and in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Ashley Lee, he admitted that being able to look his fellow actors in the eye was a relief after playing a blind man who doesn’t typically make eye contact.

That tendency may have cost him during an audition for the Han Solo Star Wars spinoff. Cox’s name hadn’t been reported among the leading candidates for the role, which eventually went to Alden Ehrenreich. Jack Reynor and Taron Egerton were the other two reported finalists. But if Cox hadn’t fallen into the tendency he developed while playing Murdock (and Daredevil), might he have made a better impression on producers?

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From THR:

“I had gone to an audition — one of those things that are super secretive and they don’t tell you, but I’m pretty sure it was for the Han Solo reboot— and halfway through it, the casting director stopped me and said, ‘Why aren’t you looking at me?’ I realized I had gotten into a habit of not making eye contact, because the only thing I had done for two years is play someone who is blind. I never got invited back, probably because they couldn’t figure out why I was acting like a complete idiot.”

OK, that’s actually a pretty funny story. Although maybe painfully funny for Cox, if it cost him a chance to play Han Solo. (Given the finalists chosen for the role, Cox doesn’t appear to have been what producers were looking for.)

It reminds me of a story Oprah Winfrey once told about acting in The Color Purple. The news anchor and talk show host was so accustomed to looking right at the camera that she did so while filming her first scenes and director Steven Spielberg wondered what she was doing.

But considering that Cox had been immersed in playing Murdock for the past two years (and 26 episodes for the Netflix series), it’s not difficult to understand how something like that could happen. As he jokes during the THR interview, maybe it will be hard for him to go back to acting blind again once production on Marvel’s The Defenders — and after that, perhaps a third season of Daredevil — begins.

[The Hollywood Reporter]

About Ian Casselberry

Ian is a writer, editor, and podcaster. You can find his work at Awful Announcing and The Comeback. He's written for Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation.