As any insider knows, Hollywood is a dog-eat-dog place. With financiers and bullish studios twisting artistry into cold hard dollars, the dreams—and careers—of many an actor are regularly chewed up and spat out. But the few big-screen performers who make it don’t always have the full picture, even at the top of their game. Friends, agents, writers, directors, producers, and studios all go out of their way to pull the wool over actors’ eyes, landing the glitterati in performances they didn’t realize they had signed up for and often would love to get out of…
Related: 10 Films That Were Rescued by the Editor
10 Tyler Perry—Gone Girl (2014)
A master craftsman of the novel adaptation, director David Fincher aimed his lens at Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in 2014 and delivered an icy-cold psychological thriller for the ages. While pretty much everyone involved was thrilled to be on the project, not least because of the impact it had on their respective careers, there was one cast member who wasn’t pleased when he found out what he’d signed up for.
A minor yet crucial role in the movie, Tyler Perry plays Tanner Bolt, a lawyer known for representing men suspected of killing their wives and who represents Ben Affleck’s Nick Dunne. Despite being involved in the industry as a filmmaker in his own right, Perry was unaware of the kinds of films Fincher is in the business of making. If he had known, he would have turned the part down.
But Perry’s agent knew this and so spun him a line, keeping his client in the dark about the kind of movie it would be—and that it was an adaptation, something Perry was equally perturbed about making—long enough to get him over the line.[1]
9 Linda Blair—Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
While The Exorcist (1973) is recognized as one of the greatest horror movies of all time on pretty much every front, the undeniable star of the show is Linda Blair, the young actor who played possessed child Regan MacNeil. Nonetheless, after being overexposed at a young age, she wasn’t keen to hop back on board with a sequel.
Despite this, Exorcist II: The Heretic plowed ahead just a few years later, using an impressive, exciting, well-written script to get Blair signed on. Excited to work with Richard Burton and a host of Academy Award-nominated actors (all of whom also thought the movie was going to be a big deal), Blair was willing to return to a movie franchise that had taken over much of her life.
Unfortunately, the script she was given at the beginning of production was not the one they shot. Blair and all her castmates just had to roll with the blows, adapting to the new material as it got progressively worse. It was rewritten five times in total, and the movie they made was a disaster, leaving all the cast’s hopes in ruin.[2]
8 Chris Rock—Bee Movie (2007)
The subject of a near-infinite number of memes, Jerry Seinfeld’s Bee Movie has lived far beyond its original premise as a family-friendly animation in the years since its release. And while its voice cast—which includes Seinfeld himself, Renee Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, and Chris Rock—is stacked with enough talent to have made it immortal, it wasn’t easy getting all of them on board.
Indeed, Seinfeld himself had to make the case directly to Rock to get him on the cast. He had a tough time of it, with Rock initially being resistant about joining what he saw as the next Shrek. But Jerry had one ace up his sleeve: Steven Spielberg.
Seinfeld talked up the apparent involvement of the legendary filmmaker to get Rock to sign on the dotted line. However, when Rock turned up to record his part, there wasn’t a trace of Spielberg to be found. While the Jurassic Park director had helped Seinfeld get his foot in the door with Dreamworks and featured in a couple of live-action trailers to promote the film, that is where his involvement ended.[3]
7 Paula Abdul—Bruno (2009)
Despite having enjoyed a successful career as a singer, dancer, and actress in her own right, Paula Abdul was better known in the 2000s for judging American Idol. This is what put her in the crosshairs of prankster Sacha Baron Cohen, who followed up his hit mockumentary Borat (2006) with another, less successful outing in the genre.
Starring as gay Austrian fashion journalist Bruno, Cohen travels to the U.S. in the hopes of becoming a Hollywood celebrity. Along the way, he interviews and irritates a host of famous faces—Abdul included. The only thing is, Paula didn’t know she was starring in the movie until after the fact.
Having been told she was receiving the International Artist of the Year award, the American Idol judge arrived for an interview with Bruno. Cohen’s team kept all of Abdul’s stylists and entourage out to maintain secrecy and put the star in an interview that included sitting on and being served sushi from the bodies of live men. Abdul didn’t realize the full extent of what had happened—or the German-language agreement her publicist had signed—until the media called asking what it was like to work with Cohen…[4]
6 Bill Murray—Garfield: The Movie (2004)
The first major Garfield feature arrived two decades before the most recent one, inserting a CGI fat cat into the real world, with Bill Murray providing a sardonic voice to match the comic strips. Despite this ingenious casting, Garfield has been the bane of Bill Murray’s career ever since he agreed to do it—but it’s his own fault.
When Murray received the script for the movie, he mistook writer Joel Cohen for Joel Coen of Fargo (1996) and Big Lebowski (1998) fame. Thus, the actor signed up on name recognition alone, figuring the guy who made some of the smartest, funniest films of the past decade would steer him right.
Nobody was quick to correct his mistake, not least because it meant they got to keep one of Hollywood’s funniest men on an otherwise run-of-the-mill production. It wasn’t until Murray turned up to record his lines that he realized something was wrong—namely, a lack of gags and good writing. He watched the film to get a feel for what had gone awry, and this was when they told him who was behind it, but by that point, it was too late.[5]
5 Bill Murray—Ghostbusters II (1989)
Garfield was not the first time Murray had been stung on the run-up to a film. While some would say he should have known better, somehow, his experience with Ghostbusters II didn’t leave him with any lasting vigilance.
After the success of the first movie—itself essentially a series of skits by SNL cast members that nobody expected to be so big—Murray was reluctant to do a sequel. But given not just the nine-figure box office numbers but the infinite merchandise and branding potential, nobody else involved was going to let this stand. Someone (possibly director Ivan Reitman) rounded up the cast, got them laughing and having fun again, and pitched a sequel story idea that made Murray think it might just work.
As these things go, however, the film that was pitched, and even the one that was written, was not the film they shot. Murray figured that as the ink was dry and they were already shooting it, there was nothing to do but grin, bear it, and try to make the most of things.[6]
4 Halle Berry—X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
X-Men: The Last Stand is nobody’s favorite X-Men movie, having brought the franchise to its knees. This fate would last five years before Matthew Vaughn set it back on its feet with prequel/reboot X-Men: First Class (2011). But for all the film’s more obvious failings, its worst ones happened behind the scenes.
Vaughn was originally in 20th Century Fox’s sights as the director for The Last Stand. However, one fateful meeting, in which he uncovered the studio’s plan to trick Halle Berry into returning, made him walk away.
Berry was lured back to the franchise with a padded, false script that put her character—Storm—front and center rather than (as things turned out) a much smaller part of a large ensemble. While Berry never found out about this before the contract was signed, Vaughn did. While visiting an executive’s office in Tinseltown, he saw the fake script. When he discovered what they were doing with it, he washed his hands with the project altogether. Thus, the studio went with Brett Ratner, and the rest is history.[7]
3 Sylvester Stallone—Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992)
The 1990s saw a lot of ’80s action stars turn to comedy, pivoting with a new decade and trying to broaden their appeal. And while results varied wildly, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot—in which Sylvester Stallone stars as a police sergeant whose mother (Estelle Getty) tags along on a brutal murder case—is a certified dud.
Why, then, did Stallone put himself up for it? It has everything to do with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been Sly’s cinematic rival during the ’80s action era and was gunning for him in the ’90s.
Schwarzenegger was offered the script first and recognized it as a flop. Still, knowing the part was being offered to Stallone, he decided to lay a trap. Certain Stallone would want the role if he heard Arnie was interested, Schwarzenegger called his agent and director Roger Spottiswoode feigning interest. They reported back to the Rocky star, and true to form, Stallone jumped at the opportunity. It wasn’t until years later, after the film had bombed and the two stars had become friends, that Sly found out he had been duped.[8]
2 Ryan Reynolds—X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
When Fox was trying to breathe life back into the X-Men franchise with their Origins series, they presented Ryan Reynolds with an ultimatum. If he wanted to play Deadpool, he’d have to be in this one.
He wrote and ad-libbed every line of his own dialogue, as the script had nothing prepared for him. Still, even this couldn’t save him, as Fox decided to destroy the character, sewing his mouth shut and making him unrecognizable. Despite promising that if Reynolds didn’t play the character, they would have someone else play him, this is what happened anyway. When Reynolds’s shooting time was up, they had Scott Adkins play the transformed version of the character in the film’s final sequence.
Despite this ostensibly being the first step on Reynolds’s path to a standalone Deadpool movie, the studio then shelved this idea. Had it not been for test footage being leaked five years later—confirmed via lie detector to have been assisted by Reynolds himself—it might never have been made at all.[9]
1 The Entire Cast—Movie 43 (2013)
An anthology comedy that everyone would rather forget, Movie 43 took all the excesses of gross-out filmmaking from the preceding decades and wrote them across an excruciating 94 minutes. Featuring an ensemble cast of, among others, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Halle Berry, Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, and Emma Stone, this is a rare occasion where the entire cast was duped into starring.
Halle Berry dumps her breasts in a bowl of guacamole; Hugh Jackman has a pair of testicles on his chin; and Gerard Butler is a foul-mouthed leprechaun—these are just a few of the scenarios these Hollywood A-listers found themselves in throughout Movie 43. However, they didn’t realize it would be like this.
Most of the cast were convinced in small, casual pitches at parties and weddings by producer-director Peter Farrelly and his producing partner Charlie Wessler. Few of the stars knew what they would be shooting—and neither did the filmmakers, clobbering the movie together as they went. When the time came, Farrelly knew the actors wanted out of the project, and while a few slipped the net, he wouldn’t let most of them go.[10]