The Actors Who Passed on Mork From Ork Included Comedy Legends, a Hogg of Hazzard and a Tony Award Winner

These days, it’s hard to imagine anyone but Robin Williams as Mork From Ork on Happy Days and later Mork & Mindy, but at first, it was hard to imagine anyone at all. Wisconsin in the 1950s wasn’t exactly the natural setting for a space invasion, but Happy Days creator Garry Marshall was desperate for ideas to keep the show fresh, and everyone seemed to love this Star Wars business. After the writers’ room cobbled together a script on Marshall’s orders, “we had one major hurdle left — to cast the right alien,” Marshall wrote in My Happy Days in Hollywood: A Memoir.

His first choice was John Byner, a voice actor and Ed Sullivan Show veteran. He “had a wild look in his eyes and the offbeat wit I thought would be good for the alien,” Marshall wrote, so “we arranged a meeting with Byner and made a tentative deal for him to star in the series. Then an odd thing happened: Close to shooting, Byner decided he didn’t want to play an alien on a television series.”

We can only speculate on Byner’s motivations, but considering the troubles the production was about to have, the “odd thing” that happened might have been that Byner read the script, which was admittedly ridiculous. After he left, “Dom DeLuise booked it and (then) he backed out," producer Bryan Levant told E! News in 2019. “Then we got another guy, the Sheriff of Nottingham from Mel Brook’s Robin Hood movie, and he backed out, saying he doesn’t want to be Mork.”

Again, Levant doesn’t explain why Roger Rees — who played the Sheriff of Rottingham, and you will have some respect — declined the role after accepting it, but according to Dave Itzkoff’s biography Robin, the Tony Award winner and veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company complained, “I can’t do this role. He’s not a real person.” At that point, “we shoot on Friday, and it’s Wednesday,” Levant recalled. As producers got increasingly frantic, “a new agent named Alan Iezman tried to sell us Richard Lewis and Jeff Altman,” most famous for his neurotic portrayal of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Hughie Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard, respectively, “but they were not quite right,” which is a shame. A maladjusted Mork could have been fun.

Different people have been credited for suggesting Robin Williams, but they’d probably agree that all credit goes to Williams himself. The producers would likely have accepted a particularly talented squirrel at that point, but Williams brought his A-game to the audition. For Marshall’s part, he knew Williams was his man when he asked him to take a seat and “Williams turned around, bent over, and ‘sat’ on his head with his rear end up in the air.” 

Marshall later insisted that, no matter how he’d felt about Williams, his hands were tied: Williams was simply the only alien who auditioned.