5 Actors Who Ruined Movie Shoots By Having Too Much Fun
Actors assure us that acting is very serious art, and when they make a movie, that’s very serious work. We would never dream of contradicting them about this. But we have noticed the occasional actor who shows up on a movie set and doesn’t take their job quite so seriously, and sometimes, the consequences make it into the final cut.
Keith Richards in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’
For the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Johnny Depp made the inspired choice to base his performance of Jack Sparrow on a famous music star, an idea not written into the script. A couple years later, he made the inspired choice to base his performance of Willy Wonka on a famous music star, but that was completely different because Michael Jackson and Keith Richards are very different characters.
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For the third movie, they got Keith Richards himself, the inspiration behind that Jack Sparrow portrayal, to come on as Jack Sparrow’s father. He shuffles about in an appropriately drunken manner. This isn’t some great effort to take on the role but is instead Richards downplaying how drunk he really was during the shoot. After finding the man drunk in his trailer, director Gore Verbinski had to physically support him, first as he moved to get made up and then partly during the shoot itself.
Richards returned with more lines in one of the later films. No stories say he was notably drunk during that one, and his scene was resultantly not notable for any reason at all.
In a still later Pirates film, Paul McCartney popped in to do the same joke of an old rock star cameoing as one of Sparrow’s relatives. This scene also featured no real-life intoxication and ground the whole movie to a brief halt with its pointlessness.
Jennifer Grey in ‘Dirty Dancing’
Dirty Dancing is a fictional story about an experienced dancer (Johnny) teaching someone who’s brand new to the craft (Baby). It’s also the real-life story about an experienced dancer (Patrick Swayze) teaching someone who’s brand-new to the craft (Jennifer Grey). Some of the friction between teacher and pupil was caught on film.
At the end of the following montage, you’ll see the pair practicing a dance move, which ends with Johnny/Swayze’s hand moving down Baby/Grey’s arm. She starts laughing, ruining the pose. They try again, and she laughs again, to the guy’s frustration. The script didn’t tell them to do this. This was instead Grey genuinely breaking and ruining the pose they were trying to do.
This also works somewhat contrary to what the scene is trying to do. This isn’t a funny scene. There are other scenes where the two characters joke with each other but not this one. This scene is supposed to be intense and sexual, but then it has one character laughing. Of course, audiences still liked the scene, since audiences like to believe that characters are “human beings” who should sometimes react to situations “the way real people might.”
Swayze resented this so much that he wrote about it in his autobiography, recalling the way Grey’s laughter forced them to restart scenes. Incidentally, some sources take this criticism a little out of context. They say he called her unprofessional. He really said that she wasn’t a professional dancer, which isn’t quite the same thing. No, he merely implied that she was unprofessional.
The Dogs in ‘Cujo’
Fortunately, “acting like human beings” wasn’t going to be an issue for our next performers. These were a selection of a dozen St. Bernard dogs playing the title role in 1983’s Cujo. Unfortunately, though they didn’t act like humans, they did have a tendency to act like dogs, which introduced its own problems.
The way the crew got these dogs to move around was to lure them from place to place with toys. This led the happy dogs to enthusiastically wag their tails, which didn’t suit the role of a rabid dog prepared to kill. To stop the tails from catching the camera’s attention, the crew had to tie the tails down.
At least, that’s how they handled the dog actors. In some scenes, Cujo was instead portrayed by a human stunt performer in a dog costume. How they kept him from wagging his tail remains a tightly kept trade secret.
The Cat in ‘The Godfather’
Equally disrespectful of the filmmaking process was one actor from an early scene in The Godfather. The famous opening scene has a cat in Vito Corleone’s lap. This cat audibly purrs and meows at seemingly random spots in the conversation. Between Corleone’s speaking style and the dental prosthesis that Brando wore, intelligible speech was enough of a challenge as it was, and the audio team back in the lab feared the cat’s interjections might keep audiences from understanding what anyone was saying.
Perhaps they would have counseled Francis Ford Coppola about this if he’d consulted them beforehand. But no one planned this cat’s part in this drama. The cat was a stray who wandered into the studio, and Coppola just plopped it into Brando’s lap for that scene, with no warning or explanation. Since the cat couldn’t be trusted for a repeat performance, that take had to be the only one they did of that scene.
Coppola was a young and inexperienced filmmaker at the time. More skilled recent work, such as Megalopolis, shows tighter control, and the results speak for themselves.
Neil Young in ‘The Last Waltz’
Concert films don’t contain traditional acting. The artist performs, using whatever style they like for the concert, and the director captures it, maybe jazzing it up by switching camera angles. The singer can’t really make a wrong move, other than by singing badly — and even that isn’t a wrong move because the director would like to capture that as well.
The Last Waltz is a concert film covering a 1976 performance by Robbie Robertson’s group The Band. The concert also featured a bunch of other artists, such as Neil Diamond, Neil Young and even several who weren’t named Neil. When Young took the stage to sing “Helpless,” the camera recorded cocaine on his face, complete with a visible rock still apparent on one nostril.
You won’t see the cocaine in the above video. Director Martin Scorsese was all for leaving it in because as we said, the whole point of a concert film is to capture the details of the concert, bumps and all. But Young’s management insisted that the cocaine be edited out due to all the repercussions Young might suffer, possibly including actual legal consequences. This tweaking proved to be a laborious process, as this was the age before editing went digital.
Young’s indiscretion violated the unwritten contract that performers enter, in which they promise to keep their noses clean. Obviously, everyone involved in this movie did cocaine behind-the-scenes, but you’re supposed to freshen up before the camera starts running. Actors are supposed to lie for us. That’s what we pay them for.
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