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Danny Lloyd played Danny Torrance in The Shining as a five-year-old. He also didn't know he was making a horror movie. This is mostly because he was told he wasn't.
Director Stanley Kubrick actually had the child's best interest at heart (which is surprising, given his well-documented reputation), so in order to protect little Danny from trauma, he not only told him they were making a drama, but he took steps to keep Danny out of scary situations. When Wendy is running from Jack with Danny in her arms, she's actually carrying a dummy, so the boy wouldn't have to be in a scary scene.
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The Thin Red Line is based on a novel about the Battle of Mount Austen, revolving around the character Corporal Fife (played by Adrien Brody in the movie). Brody made the reasonable assumption that he was the main character of the film, since Fife was the main character of the novel, but it turned out he was wrong.
Since he was an up-and-comer at the time, many of his scenes were cut from the final product, highlighting the real stars of the film George Clooney, John Travolta, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, and Sean Penn, even though none of them were, you know, the protagonist. Brody, unfortunately, was unaware of the cuts, but learned when he viewed the premiere with his parents whom he had brought along.
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- Guild Films Company
- Wikimedia Commons
- Public domain
Frankie Laine was a singer who recorded music for a number of famous westerns like 3:10 to Yuma and Rawhide, so Mel Brooks thought he'd be a perfect fit for the theme of Blazing Saddles. Frankie Laine agreed to take the gig, and was so moved by his performance that he cried after recording it.
This is a strange reaction, considering the movie's a preposterous satire of the Western genre, but Laine apparently had no idea: "I thought I was doing a song for another High Noon, and I gave it my best dramatic reading... When I saw wacky things happening on the screen, like a guy punching a horse, I sunk down into my seat with embarrassment."
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Everyone Thought They Were Keyser Soze In 'The Usual Suspects'
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Bryan Singer kept his entire cast in the dark on The Usual Suspects, so that going into the premiere, Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro, Stephen Baldwin, and Kevin Pollak all thought they were Keyser Soze. Byrne was so upset, he apparently dragged Singer outside and screamed at him.
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Garfield: The Movie was written by Joel Cohen, not to be confused with Joel Coen of the much celebrated sibling filmmakers. Someone should have cleared that up for Bill Murray, because he thought it was that Joel Coen. Therefore, he only read a couple of pages of the script before accepting the role, trusting Joel Coen implicitly.
But when he started recording his lines, he was ultimately forced to ask, "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the f*ck was Coen thinking?" so they explained that it was the other Joel Cohen.
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- The Empire Strikes Back
- 20th Century Fox
If you don't know the name of the man who wore the Darth Vader costume in the original Star Wars trilogy, it's David Prowse. Prowse was excited about the role until he learned that he wasn't actually voicing Vader.
Frustrated, he decided to start tweaking his lines, since he knew his reading wouldn't make it in anyway. And thus "Asteroids do not concern me, I need a ship," was transformed into the far more brilliant "Hemorrhoids do not concern me, I need a sh*t."
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Gore Vidal doctored up the screenplay for Ben-Hur a bit by injecting just a pinch of homoerotic subtext. In fact, he told director William Wyler as much. Wyler agreed to keep it in the film, but told Vidal not to tell Charlton Heston, who would "fall apart" if he knew.
Heston disputed the claim in his memoir, to which Vidal essentially said, "Surprise, surprise." The subtle romance takes place between Heston's Judah Ben-Hur and his "friend" turned enemy Messala, who ultimately opposes Ben-Hur because he's a spurned lover. Hell hath no fury like that of a Roman scorned.
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When Piper Laurie received the script for Carrie, she was not impressed. "I read [the script] and I thought it was a comedy - no, no, no," she corrected, "I thought it was stupid." Her husband at the time told her that she misunderstood it; that director Brian De Palma had a comedic approach, so she reread it and recognized it for what it was: satire.
Well, it's neither really. But when you hear her talk about it, which you can in the above video, she initially sounds a little ridiculous, but ultimately charming. In the end, she really enjoyed both making the movie, as well as the final product. And she almost won an Oscar!
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It's no secret that Jared Leto wasn't pleased with the final cut of Suicide Squad. He felt there was enough Joker footage for an entire film on the infamous character, but in the end he was on screen for around 10 minutes. Fans weren't the only ones that felt shortchanged - Leto said he felt like he'd been "tricked."
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Apparently, Michael Fassbender isn't the most tech-savvy guy. He was not a fan of Aaron Sorkin's dense script for the eponymous biopic Steve Jobs. It was full of big, techy words.
Since he didn't really know what he was talking about, Fassbender kinda just hated the movie. He was so unhappy about it that he asked his driver to slam his arm in the car door so he could get out of his contract and stop filming the movie.
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So, to be fair, the three main characters of The Blair Witch Project knew they were making a horror film, but that was about it. Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams were sent out into the woods with a video camera for a week, told to argue with each other, interview randos (who turned out to be actors placed by the directors), and just kind of act like they were lost on a hike (which they actually were a couple of times).
What's more, the directors started to mess with the young stars as they grew colder and more sleep-deprived over the course of the week by sneaking along behind them and making ominous, spooky noises.
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With all the MCU films coming out in recent years, it's reasonable to assume some actors might mix up which scenes take place in which movies. That is exactly what happened to Gwyneth Paltrow, the MCU's own Pepper Potts, when she shot the conclusion to 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming.
While guest starring on Jon Favreau and Roy Choi's Netflix series, The Chef Show, Favreau, who is featured alongside Paltrow in Homecoming as well as several other MCU films as Tony Stark's assistant, Happy, mentions the movie to which Paltrow responds, "We weren't in Spider-Man." Favreau further attempts to convince Paltrow that the pair did in fact appear in Peter Parker's MCU debut and the actress reassures him, "No, I was in Avengers."
A baffled Favreau tells her, "You were in Spider-Man also... remember, Tom Holland's there and you're going to walk out and do a press conference and I give you the ring?"
Paltrow does remember shooting the scene, though it seems she was unaware which film that particular moment took place in, much to the delight of her fans.
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When it came to the final product, Josh Brolin knew they had made a garbage film in Jonah Hex: "Hated it... [it] would have been a better movie based on what we did. As opposed to what ended up happening to it, which is going back and reshooting 66 pages in 12 days." Apparently, the studio didn't feel it was flashy enough, so they ended up doing a ton of reshoots, and ultimately spent $80 million making the movie.
Ironically, Brolin thought the movie would have been much better if they had emulated an old western called High Plains Drifter, and could have pulled it off for under $10 million. Things have certainly taken a turn for Brolin in comic book land since then, however, as he was cast as both Thanos and Cable.
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In case you're also not in the know, Nine Months is a 20th Century Fox film, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It wasn't so much that Grant didn't know what kind of film he was making, but he "didn't even know who owned [the studio]." He admitted to being naive about the film, and wishes he hadn't done it.
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If you're not familiar with it, Dark Tide was the one and only shark movie in history. Oh, wait, no: it is one of approximately 10 million shark movies. On Chelsea Lately, Berry said, "You don't expect [a movie] to be as bad as it is sometimes. Then it comes out, and you think, 'F*ck. That's what I did?'"
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Nicolas Cage wasn't alone in his disapproval of Dying of the Light. Led by director Paul Schrader, stars Nic Cage, Anton Yelchin, and executive producer Nic Winding Refn found a clever way to protest the film, which they were contractually barred from disparaging: by wearing t-shirts sporting their non-disparagement agreements.
Apparently, due to some differing visions for the film, Schrader was kicked out of the editing process, and the resulting movie was terrible. Whether or not it would have been any good had he been allowed to complete his work will never be known.
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The Art of ActingLists about actors and actresses and the characters they became, how they disappeared into roles, what they really look like, and more.
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The Art of Acting
Lists about actors and actresses and the characters they became, how they disappeared into roles, what they really look like, and more.
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