- 2 weeks ago
Not every actor nails it. These 10 stars prepared all wrong for their roles and the results were unforgettable.
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00:00Where acting is concerned, preparation is key, as even the least demanding role requires an actor to turn up to set with their lines learned and in appropriate physical condition to play their part.
00:11But sometimes, for one of many reasons, an actor shows up ready to film having prepared in the entirely wrong way.
00:18From learning the wrong accent, to bulking up too much, doing some misguided research, or even just shaving their whole beard off,
00:26in many cases, this caused issues on set and forced the filmmakers to pivot their original plans,
00:32coming up with a quick solution to ensure that filming as a whole wasn't impacted.
00:37So, with that in mind, I'm Ellie with WhatCulture, here with actors who prepared totally wrong for a role.
00:44Ian McKellen learned the wrong accent, the keep.
00:47Ian McKellen is about as much of a pro as actors get, but in a recent interview with Variety,
00:53he revealed that a miscommunication between himself and director Michael Mann on 1983's cult horror film, The Keep,
01:00led to him learning the wrong accent for the part.
01:03According to McKellen, Mann told him to develop a Romanian accent to play the role of a Jewish history professor,
01:10prompting McKellen to characteristically whole-ass the job by visiting Romania and getting first-hand experience to learn the accent.
01:17But when the actor finally made it to set for the first day of shooting, Mann instead told him to play the role with a Chicago accent,
01:25which caused friction between the two.
01:28McKellen wasn't prepared to play the part with a twang from The Windy City,
01:31and so basically opted for a broader generic American accent.
01:35Combined with the hours he had to spend in the makeup chair each day in order to appear older,
01:40McKellen called The Keep his worst movie-making experience.
01:44Ryan Gosling gained too much weight, The Lovely Bones.
01:48For Peter Jackson's 2009 adaptation of hit novel The Lovely Bones,
01:53Ryan Gosling was initially cast to play Jack Salmon, the father of murdered protagonist Susie Salmon.
01:59Yet during the pre-production process, Gosling reportedly got twitchy about appearing too young for the part,
02:04given that the then 26-year-old actor had to persuasively resemble the father of a 14-year-old girl.
02:10And so Gosling made the decision to both grow a large beard and gain 60 pounds of weight
02:16by drinking melted Haagen-Dazs ice cream whenever he got thirsty.
02:20Ooh.
02:21Because Jackson was extremely busy during pre-production,
02:24he and Gosling had minimal communication until shooting approached.
02:28And when Gosling turned up on set,
02:30Jackson wasn't best thrilled at the radical choice he made without consulting him.
02:34And with that, Gosling was fired from the movie and, in his own words, was left fat and unemployed.
02:40Harris Dickinson studied being a mechanic for a cut plot, Triangle of Sadness.
02:46It's incredibly common for actors to extensively research the internal lives of their characters in order to get in character,
02:53such as working the job that their character does in the story.
02:56And so it seemed totally reasonable that up-and-comer Harris Dickinson studied as a car mechanic
03:02while prepping to play model Carl in the Oscar-nominated black comedy Triangle of Sadness.
03:08Except, wait a minute, was there anything in the movie about Carl being a mechanic while breaking into the modelling industry?
03:15Nope.
03:16Well, there was in the film's original script,
03:18which detailed that Carl was working as a mechanic when he was scouted to be a model.
03:23And so Dickinson did a lot of research around cars and being a mechanic,
03:27only to turn up on set and be told that this element of Carl's character had been excised from the script during revisions.
03:34I mean, there's nothing in the final film that prevents this from being Carl's secret backstory,
03:39so if it helped Dickinson develop a sense of his character regardless of the cuts,
03:43then what's the harm?
03:44Beyond all the wasted time, of course.
03:47Fran Drescher took vocal lessons to eliminate her nasal voice, the beautician and the beast.
03:52In 1997's rom-com The Beautician and the Beast,
03:56actress Fran Drescher and current president of the Screen Actors Guild, don't you forget,
04:01portrayed Joy Miller, a New Yorker beautician who is mistaken for a science teacher by an Eastern European dictator.
04:09In an attempt to more persuasively sell that balmy conceit,
04:13Drescher decided to ditch her signature nasal accent,
04:16even going to the bother of taking vocal lessons to subdue her natural nasal quality and sound less quote-unquote grating.
04:24But when Drescher made it to set sporting a new vocal tenor,
04:28the producers were taken aback and insisted that she toss all that voice training out with the bathwater.
04:34As it turns out, the filmmakers cast Drescher precisely because of her distinctive accent,
04:39as they felt it would further enhance the culture clash element of the silly story.
04:44All the same, Drescher received a Razzie nomination for Worst Actress for her work on the film
04:49and reviews commonly cited her voice as annoying and off-putting.
04:54Whoopsie!
04:55Brian Cox lost £45 and dyed his hair red.
04:59Red Eye
04:59The great Brian Cox was cast in Wes Craven's 2005 thriller Red Eye
05:04after the filmmakers saw his terrific performance as CIA station chief in The Bourne Supremacy during pre-production.
05:11However, between being cast and turning up to shoot his supporting role in Craven's film
05:16as the father of Rachel McAdams' protagonist,
05:19Cox intentionally lost around £45 after being diagnosed with diabetes
05:23and had dyed his hair red to perform a play in Scotland.
05:27It wasn't quite what Craven and co. were expecting when they hired Cox.
05:31They anticipated a hefty, white-haired man to portray McAdams' father
05:35rather than the more slimmed-down, red-haired guy who showed up on set.
05:40There wasn't anything to be done about Cox's weight,
05:42but the production had the actor's hair dyed black.
05:45It's far from a subtle dye job and presumably aggressive enough
05:48to ensure that there wasn't even the faintest trace of red left on his noggin.
05:53I mean, the movie's not called Red Head, after all.
05:55At the time, Cox noted that even his own agent became concerned
06:00about how much the weight loss had changed his appearance,
06:03with the actor joking that he had made himself unemployable.
06:06But at least healthy, eh?
06:08Henry Fonda grew a moustache and wore dark contact lenses
06:12once upon a time in the West.
06:14It cannot be overstated how much of a big deal it was
06:18to see Henry Fonda playing the villainous outlaw Frank
06:21in 1968's western Once Upon a Time in the West.
06:25It was a far cry from the upstanding, heroic characters
06:28Fonda was better known for portraying,
06:30and after some initial trepidation, he agreed to take the part.
06:34But on the first day of shooting,
06:35Fonda arrived on set with a moustache and wearing brown contact lenses,
06:40feeling that the physical transformation would make it easier
06:42for audiences to accept him playing an evil character.
06:45Yet the director saw the matter completely differently
06:48and was excited to shock the audience
06:51by having Fonda play a child murderer.
06:53He wanted viewers to know precisely who they were looking at,
06:57to recognise Fonda's distinctive face and deep blue eyes,
07:00and so immediately ordered him to remove the contacts
07:03and have his tash shaved off.
07:06And boy, it was certainly the right decision,
07:08as that initial reveal of Frank's face just pops.
07:10Pops, Anoushka Hempel got a tan to play Dracula's bride.
07:16Scars of Dracula.
07:17Here's something you've probably never even thought about.
07:20Actors can create a cluster headache for make-up artists
07:23if they arrive on set fresh off a sun holiday,
07:26and it doesn't suit the director's vision for the character
07:29or even make basic narrative sense.
07:31Case in point, in 1970's Scars of Dracula,
07:35Anoushka Hempel was cast to play Dracula's imprisoned vampire mistress.
07:39The part required Hempel to be pale-skinned,
07:42being Dracula's vampiric plaything after all,
07:44and so make-up artist Roy Ashton became a teensy bit cheesed off
07:49when she reported to set sporting a deep tan
07:52from a recent holiday to sunny Barbados.
07:55Though Ashton evidently did his best to apply make-up to Hempel's face and body
07:59to give her a more pallid complexion,
08:01there's no mistaking her very obvious tan throughout the film,
08:05especially in comparison to Christopher Lee's more appropriately pasty,
08:09washed-out appearance.
08:11Given that Hempel bears a fair amount of skin throughout the film,
08:14there was surely only so much that they could do to conceal her golden glow.
08:19Dermot Crowley shaved his beard,
08:21Star Wars Episode VI Return of the Jedi.
08:24You may not remember the name Crix Maidine,
08:26but you might recall the rebel general in Star Wars Episode VI Return of the Jedi
08:30who devises the plan to destroy the second Death Star's shield generator.
08:35More to the point,
08:36there's a good chance you notice the very obvious fake beard glued to the guy's face,
08:40because apparently a $40 million sci-fi epic
08:43couldn't afford some decent facial hair make-up.
08:46Yet there's more to the story than this.
08:48Maidine's actor, Dermot Crowley,
08:50risked causing a not-insignificant kerfuffle for the production
08:54when he turned up to set with a clean-shaven face,
08:57given that even the most minor of Star Wars characters
09:00have their own action figures and peripheral merchandise prepared in advance.
09:05When Crowley reported to set to shoot his small role,
09:07the action figures for Maidine had already been manufactured
09:10and showed him rocking a decent growth of facial hair.
09:14And so, in order to not create a legal issue with the toy company,
09:17Crowley was quickly fitted with the infamously naff fake beard.
09:21I mean, just look at that thing.
09:23Henry Cavill got too ripped to play an everyman,
09:26The Cold Light of Day.
09:28When you think everyman, you probably don't imagine Henry Cavill,
09:31an actor who, for the last decade,
09:33has mostly portrayed impossibly buff larger-than-life heroes like Superman.
09:37All the same, Cavill wasn't quite so known for being a beefcake back in 2011,
09:42when he was hired to star in the action thriller The Cold Light of Day
09:46as a regular bloke who is forced to take action when his family is kidnapped.
09:50However, Cavill had recently finished shooting the fantasy action film Immortals,
09:55where he played the extremely ripped Greek mythic hero Theseus.
09:59And so, when he made it to set to shoot his new movie,
10:01he still retained much of that chiseled physique.
10:04The director soundly informed Cavill that his look was entirely wrong
10:08for a character who was intended to be an everyman,
10:10and he needed to shed as much of his muscle tone as possible
10:13in the days before filming was to start.
10:16Cavill apparently achieved this by eating and drinking whatever he wanted
10:19and doing no exercise whatsoever.
10:22The end result ultimately isn't very convincing,
10:25but there nothing in this movie is, so he shouldn't feel too bad.
10:28Ryan Phillippe dyed his hair blue without telling anyone,
10:32playing by heart.
10:33A slightly less troublesome entry than most on this list now,
10:36albeit one that still shows an actor making a judgement call
10:39about their character's appearance without consulting anybody else.
10:42For the 1998 dramedy playing by heart,
10:45Ryan Phillippe decided to dye his hair blue
10:47and didn't run this decision by the writer,
10:50director, producers, the makeup department or anyone else.
10:53Phillippe simply decided to show up on set sporting a dyed head of hair,
10:58surprising the cast and crew,
11:00but the director ultimately decided that he liked the look
11:02and it suited Phillippe's character and so allowed the actor to keep it.
11:06It's also worth noting that Phillippe's co-star Angelina Jolie
11:10similarly has her hair dyed red throughout the film.
11:13The reports vary online as to whether or not this was motivated
11:16by Phillippe's radical hair colour change or not.
11:19All the same, Phillippe's unexpected dye job
11:21makes this otherwise forgettably competent movie
11:24just a little more memorable.
11:26All the same, Phillippe's beautiful.
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