Once an actor has nailed their audition and been forged in a movie, you’d suppose that they’re locked in for the lengthy haul. However that’s removed from the case.
A few of the greatest, most celebrated stars in Hollywood have been let go from high-profile films – an expertise that’s absolutely solely made worse if the information then makes headlines around the globe.
Typically, a performer and their director conflict behind the scenes, whether or not that’s over unhealthy behaviour or their completely totally different approaches to the supply materials. Typically, there’s no actual backstage drama – it’s merely the case that, as soon as the filmmakers see them on set, in costume and interacting with their co-stars, the actor simply doesn’t make sense within the function they’ve been employed to play.
Listed below are among the most notorious Hollywood firings so far…
Julianne Moore, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Manufacturing was about to start on Can You Ever Forgive Me?, with Julianne Moore forged as infamous literary forger Lee Israel, the creator who wrote and bought faux letters from well-known writers like Noel Coward and Dorothy Parker. However a couple of days earlier than capturing began, Moore was despatched packing. “Nicole [Holofcener, the film’s co-writer and then-director] fired me,” the actor later revealed. “I believe she didn’t like what I used to be doing. I believe that her concept of the place the character was, was totally different than the place my concept of the place the character was, and so she fired me.” Richard E Grant, who performed Israel’s buddy Jack within the completed movie reverse Melissa McCarthy within the lead function, later claimed that Moore had “needed to put on a fats go well with and a faux nostril”.
After Moore’s departure, the manufacturing collapsed – an expertise that Holofcener described as “traumatic” and “horrible” – and later underwent a major shake-up, with a brand new forged and new director, Marielle Heller. Nonetheless Holofcener and her co-writer Jeff Whitty ultimately earned an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, with McCarthy and Grant choosing up appearing nominations too. As for Moore? When she final mentioned this episode again in 2019, she nonetheless hadn’t seen the movie, as a result of “it’s nonetheless type of painful”.
Ryan Gosling, The Pretty Bones
When Ryan Gosling was forged as a father grieving his murdered daughter in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Noughties bestseller The Pretty Bones, he set to work making ready for the function in a considerably unorthodox means: by ingesting melted Haagen Dazs ice cream to be able to placed on weight. He ended up gaining about 60 kilos – apparently prompting Jackson to do a double take when Gosling arrived for filming.
“We had a unique concept of how the character ought to look. I actually believed he must be 210 kilos,” the actor later instructed a Hollywood Reporter roundtable. “We didn’t speak very a lot in the course of the pre-production course of which was the issue,” he added. “It was an enormous film, and there’s so many issues to cope with, and he couldn’t cope with the actors individually. I simply confirmed up on the set, and I had gotten it flawed. Then I used to be fats and unemployed.” Author and producer Fran Walsh, who can be Jackson’s associate, gave a barely totally different perspective on Gosling’s departure, suggesting that the star, who was then in his late twenties, had come to really feel that he was too younger to play the daddy of a youngster. Mark Wahlberg was ultimately drafted in to fill the function.
Megan Fox, Transformers: Darkish Aspect of the Moon
In 2009, with two blockbuster Transformers films below her belt, Megan Fox’s star was firmly on the rise. Like several actor of their ascendancy, she sat down with {a magazine}, on this case Wonderland, for an interview… after which issues went awry. Within the ensuing profile, Fox likened Transformers director Michael Bay to Hitler. “He’s like Napoleon and he needs to create this insane, notorious mad man fame,” she instructed the publication. “He needs to be like Hitler on his units, and he’s.”
Her character Mikaela didn’t seem within the subsequent instalment of the franchise, with mannequin Rosie Huntington-Whiteley becoming a member of as a brand new love curiosity for important character Sam (Shia LaBeouf). In 2011, Bay claimed that the movie’s government producer Steven Spielberg had requested for Fox to be fired. “You understand the Hitler factor? Steven mentioned ‘hearth her proper now,’” he instructed GQ. Fox later described the incident as “completely the low level of my profession”, however mentioned she realized from it, too. “With out ‘that factor’, I wouldn’t have realized as rapidly as I did,” she instructed Cosmopolitan. “All I needed to do was apologise, and I refused. I used to be so self-righteous at 23, I couldn’t see [that] it was for the larger good. I actually thought I used to be Joan of Arc.”
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Natalie Portman, Romeo + Juliet
It’s now onerous to think about anybody however Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes within the title roles in Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s love story. Earlier than the cameras began rolling in Luhrmann’s model of honest Verona, although, Natalie Portman had been forged as Juliet, beating tons of of younger hopefuls to the function.
However Portman was in her early teenagers, and through preliminary rehearsals it quickly grew to become clear that romantic scenes between her and 21-year-old DiCaprio weren’t “applicable”, and she or he left the movie. “It was an advanced scenario,” the actor mentioned later. “On the time I used to be 13 and Leonardo was 21, and it wasn’t applicable within the eyes of the movie firm or the director, Baz. It was type of a mutual choice too that it simply wasn’t going to be proper on the time.” Luhrmann shone extra mild on the reasoning behind her departure in a 2022 interview, telling the New York Instances: “If you [saw] Leo within the flesh, he’s a tall, younger man and also you simply realised, she was too younger. Natalie was superb within the footage, but it surely was an excessive amount of of a burden for her at that age.”
Stuart Townsend, The Lord of the Rings
The Fellowship of the Ring might’ve seemed very totally different. When Peter Jackson was assembling the forged for his display model of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy epic, he lined up Irish actor Stuart Townsend to play Aragorn. However after months of coaching and rehearsals, Townsend was let go from the movie – only a few days into the shoot. “The director needed me after which apparently thought higher of it as a result of he actually needed somebody 20 years older than me and fully totally different,” Townsend instructed Leisure Weekly a couple of years later, including that he had “no good emotions for these folks in cost”.
The producers then phoned Viggo Mortensen (14 years Townsend’s senior) and requested him to fly out to New Zealand for filming on the final minute. “After I was instructed that I might be changing somebody I felt awkward about it,” he mirrored later. “I puzzled if I might meet the actor however he was gone once I received there. I used to be simply thrown into it and needed to do one of the best I might.”
Viggo Mortensen, Platoon
Mortensen, in the meantime, had already had his personal expertise of being unexpectedly (and unceremoniously) dropped from a forged. The star instructed The Impartial that he auditioned for Oliver Stone’s Vietnam Warfare drama Platoon, just for the director to inform him that he wanted to lift more cash earlier than filming started. Mortensen then spent a yr moving into character, “studying each potential factor about Vietnam” – solely to learn in a newspaper that Stone was now making the movie with Willem Dafoe within the function he’d thought was his.
The film, Mortensen later realized throughout a telephone name, now had “an even bigger price range” and Stone needed a better profile star to match. Nonetheless, the actor now feels fairly magnanimous concerning the incident. “I wouldn’t have executed the opposite issues I’d executed if that had occurred – and if I had that kind of preliminary success, perhaps I’d have gotten uninterested in the entire thing and stop,” he reasoned.
Eric Stoltz, Again to the Future
When the producers of Again to the Future had been seeking to forged a younger actor as Marty McFly, Michael J. Fox was on the high of their checklist. However Fox was busy engaged on the sitcom Household Ties, prompting the filmmakers to enroll Eric Stoltz within the lead function. However after a couple of weeks of filming, it grew to become clear that Stoltz simply didn’t have the comedian timing to drag off the half. Plus, his methodology strategy to the function reportedly riled up a few of his fellow forged and crew. Ultimately, director Robert Zemeckis determined that Stoltz needed to go. “I merely miscast him and I realized a really severe lesson,” Zemeckis recalled, including that breaking the information to the actor “was the worst expertise of my profession”.
Fox, the producers’ first alternative, was lastly drafted in (although he must proceed filming Household Ties in the course of the day, then would shoot Again to the Future at evening). Stoltz, in the meantime, later described his firing as a “liberating” expertise. “On reflection, I believe simply getting by means of that troublesome interval helped me realise how liberating it actually was,” he instructed Moviehole. “I went again to appearing faculty, I moved to Europe, I did some performs in New York, and I truly invested in myself in a means that was a lot more healthy for me.”
Harvey Keitel, Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now’s journey to the large display was a famously tumultuous one. One of many first snags within the manufacturing? When director Francis Ford Coppola determined that his main man Harvey Keitel simply wasn’t proper for the function of Willard, the soldier ordered to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). “I might see [Keitel] was very uncomfortable about circumstances within the jungle,” Coppola claimed within the e book Coppola’s Monster Movie: The Making of Apocalypse Now. “And I believed, ‘Not solely do I believe he’s flawed casting, however what’s it going to be like for six months in these troublesome circumstances within the jungle for a metropolis man who’s afraid of it?’” Keitel later took difficulty with this model of occasions, telling Insider: “Nicely, Harvey Keitel spent three years in the US Marines Corps within the jungle.” He was changed by Martin Sheen, who confronted his personal struggles throughout filming (together with struggling a coronary heart assault on the age of simply 36).
Richard Gere, The Lords of Flatbush
Lengthy earlier than they grew to become two of Hollywood’s greatest names, Richard Gere and Sylvester Stallone had been each forged in The Lords of Flatbush, a coming of age story set within the Fifties. The pair instantly took a dislike to at least one one other. “He would strut round in his outsized bike jacket like he was the baddest evening on the spherical desk,” a still-disgruntled Stallone recalled in a 2006 interview.
The ultimate straw, although, was when a few of Gere’s lunch – “a half a hen coated in mustard with grease almost dripping out of the aluminium wrapper” – ended up on Stallone after they had been sitting alongside one another in a automobile. “A small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh,” he mentioned. “I elbowed him within the facet of the pinnacle and mainly pushed him out of the automobile.” Ultimately, Stallone mentioned, “the director had to select” between him and Gere… and the latter was “given his strolling papers”. Many years later, the pair reportedly ended up getting right into a combat over Princess Diana, based on a scene from Sir Elton John’s memoirs. After they each turned up on the similar occasion, Stallone wasn’t joyful to see that Gere gave the impression to be getting on famously with Diana; later, Sir Elton’s associate David Furnish noticed the erstwhile colleagues “within the hall, squaring up to one another, apparently about to settle their variations over Diana by having a fist-fight”.
Jean Claude van Damme, Predator
There are numerous totally different tales circulating about why Jean-Claude van Damme’s tackle Predator’s titular function by no means made it to the large display. Van Damme himself says that he hated sporting the outfit – and stilts – required to rework him into the villainous alien, and that he struggled to breathe inside it. His then co-star Invoice Duke even claimed that the motion star was given the boot after passing out within the costume as a consequence of dehydration, with a producer warning him: “When you go out once more, I’m gonna hearth you.”
Others state that the filmmakers weren’t pleased with the general look of the movie’s unhealthy man, and as soon as the costume had been redesigned, they determined to take a unique strategy with casting too: they selected the tallest actor they might discover to switch van Damme, which ended up being seven foot two basketball participant Kevin Peter Corridor. Then there’s one other hearsay that the producers received aggravated after van Damme allegedly threw the alien’s head to the ground and broken it within the course of. Maybe the ultimate straw, although, was the truth that the star apparently needed the Predator to be a kickboxer.
James Remar, Aliens
Character actor James Remar was lined as much as take the function of Corporal Dwayne Hicks in 1986’s Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi horror. However after only a few weeks on set, Remar left the movie and was changed by Michael Biehn. On the time, it was reported that Remar needed to go away the London shoot to take care of “pressing issues at residence”, however the actor later opened up about the actual motive behind his departure. “I had a horrible drug drawback, however I received by means of it,” he revealed. “I had an important profession and private life, and messed it up with a horrible drug behavior […] I used to be initially forged as Corporal Hicks, and I used to be fired after a pair weeks of filming as a result of I received busted for possession of medication.”
Kel O’Neill, There Will Be Blood
Working alongside Daniel Day Lewis may, you possibly can think about, be just a little intimidating for some performers. The actor’s painstaking Methodology strategy to roles is well-documented (as is the truth that he’s the one performer to win three Finest Actor Oscars). So when reviews emerged that Kel O’Neill had left Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie There Will Be Blood as a result of he was intimidated by Day Lewis, all of it appeared to tally with the veteran actor’s mystique. Anderson, for his half, merely mentioned that O’Neill “simply wasn’t the correct match”. Paul Dano ended up taking over O’Neill’s function; he’d already been forged as O’Neill’s on-screen brother, so ended up enjoying two components after the siblings had been conveniently rewritten to turn into twins.
A few decade after the movie’s launch, although, O’Neill put ahead his personal model of occasions in an interview with Vulture, claiming that it was he and Anderson who hadn’t received on. “Some administrators I’ve labored with simply had a means of constructing me really feel snug,” he mentioned. “For some motive, regardless that each different actor I do know had a relationship with Paul that was tremendous constructive and the place they did their finest work, that simply didn’t occur with me.”
Dennis Hopper, The Truman Present
By the Nineties, Dennis Hopper was a go-to Hollywood villain, enjoying nasty characters in movies like Pace and the infamous flop Waterworld. So when it got here to casting the function of Christof, the creepy, Svengali-like determine pulling the strings in The Truman Present, Hopper appeared like a robust alternative on paper. Nonetheless, the filmmakers weren’t completely satisfied, and have become even much less so when the cameras began rolling. After simply in the future, Hopper left the manufacturing. “Scott Rudin, the producer, had made an settlement with the director [Peter Weir] that […] he didn’t need me to do the half, and if he didn’t like what I did after the primary day’s dailies then he would hearth me,” he later defined. “They usually fired me.” Ed Harris, Hooper’s alternative, ultimately obtained an Oscar nomination for finest supporting actor for his work on the film.
