Charlie Sheen was upset at losing a role to Tom Cruise because of the "betrayal factor".

The 60-year-old actor had previously worked with director Oliver Stone on Platoon and Wall Street and thought they had an agreement that he would appear in the filmmaker's Born on the Fourth of July, and he's recalled how his brother Emilio Estevez asked him to sit down to prepare him for the shock news that the lead role had been given to their friend instead.

Speaking on In Depth with Graham Besinger, Charlie recalled: "Emilio, he calls me. He says, 'Hey, man. You sitting down?' And I think somebody died, right?

"I'm like, 'No, what's going on?" He says, 'Cruise is doing Born on the Fourth.'

"I love that Emilio thought that I needed to be seated to get news he thought was going to make me faint. I mean, what are we doing here? It's a movie.

"It's a big deal. Well, it was also the betrayal factor of it. So I was like, 'OK, all right.' You know, Oliver's been a fan of Tom's for a long time. It's a different movie if Tom does it than if I do it."

Charlie insisted the director had been clear about wanting him to play Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic but he was eventually ghosted by him.

He said: "We had meetings about it, and we had a dinner with Ron Kovic. And then I stopped hearing from him,.

"We stopped talking about it, and I reach out to Oliver, and I'm told that he's in Cuba. Whatever. This is like 1988 or '89, right? I'm like, 'OK, well, tell him I'm looking for him.' "

The former Two and a Half Men star eventually confronted Oliver about what had happened when he saw him in a bar.

He said: "I stopped in and he was there, and I was drunk enough and he was drunk enough for that thing to finally be brought up.

"And he was like, 'I just felt like you didn't have any passion for it. I felt like you lost interest.' I was like, 'Well, I didn't see you. How do you know how much passion I lost or interest that evaporated if we never talked about it again?' "

Despite his upset at losing the role, Charlie was still impressed by Tom's performance in Born on the Fourth of July which brought him an Oscar nomination.

He said: "It wasn't like a thing where I'm going to talk s*** about him, because then you see the movie and you're like, 'Oh, OK. All right. He turned it into that.'

"When someone gets a job and does that with it, you're just like, of course. You don't sit there and dissect it and like, 'I'd have done that better.' No, go f*** yourself. That's a brilliant -- and you should have won the freaking Oscar."

And the Young Guns star was philosophical about missing out on the movie.

He said: "You can't lose something you never had.

"I didn't sign a contract. There was a handshake...

"I don't know if Major League happens if I do Born on the Fourth. I'm just pretty sure that one would have gotten in the way of the other, and if it's not true, that's what I'm going with."