5 Movies That Cast Randos Right Off the Street
If you hear people who make a movie talk about pulling some actor right off the street, they probably mean they found some talented newcomer with very little experience. Sometimes, however, a movie really will grab footage of someone who’s not an actor at all. They’ll probably never act again, and you shouldn’t count on them to memorize any Shakespearean soliloquies. But when it comes to capturing the feel of some random person, it’s hard to beat filming some actual random person.
Most of the ‘Spring Breakers’ Are Real Spring Breakers
Spring Breakers had a budget of just $5 million. The portion of this devoted to paying for actors had to buy three Disney stars and one James Franco, and even hiring the director’s wife as the final starlet could only do much to keep total costs down. So, rather than hire additional actors for every scene, the vast majority of people onscreen are actual spring breakers.
This feels obvious enough in some of the wide shots of a thousand people hanging out or dancing. It becomes more surprising in the scenes where these spring breakers have lines, and is still more surprising when these spring breakers get naked. These extras didn’t sign up to be in the film before the cameras started rolling. Instead, director Harmony Korine just filmed them and asked them to sign their rights over afterward. Those scenes with unnamed bros cozying up to the actresses and trying to get them to take their clothes off are genuinely capturing real bros cozying up to the actresses and trying to get them to take their clothes off.
The irony here is a lot of people saw the marketing for the film and thought they were going to see Girls Gone Wild-style raunch but done with the script and scale of a professional production. Instead, they found themselves watching an artsy film, which just happened to have been shot using Girls Gone Wild rules.
Stu the IT Guy in ‘What We Do in the Shadows‘ Was an Actual IT Guy
Before What We Do in the Shadows was a six-season TV show, it was a film, shot for just $2 million. Like the TV show, it’s a mockumentary about Old World vampires living in the present day, but this one had different characters, covering an unrelated group of vampires living in New Zealand. Along with the vampire circle, the most major character is a human known as Stu the IT Guy.
He was played by an actual IT guy, Stu Rutherford. He was friends with director Taika Waititi, which explained why he also has a small acting credit in one previous Waititi movie, but when he showed up at the shoot, he thought they brought him on because they needed an actual IT guy, for IT reasons.
They did turn the camera on him, but since he was just doing IT stuff, and these scenes were unscripted, he didn’t imagine this was anything of significance. Then they had him put on a karate costume for a scene, and by the end of the movie, he was wearing makeup scars and had to talk about having transformed into a werewolf.
Rutherford took what he’d learned from this experience and wisely parlayed it into never acting in anything again.
The Wrestlers in ‘The Wrestler’ Were Real, and So Were a Bunch of Other People
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler was another small-budget movie, made on $6 million. So, they didn’t build wrestling sets and hire a bunch of actors to play wrestlers. Instead, they went to the independent wrestling circuit and filmed real matches, with Mickey Rourke as the only actor there. Early on, Aronofsky watched some of these matches, saw a wrestler called Necro Butcher and wanted to write a character based on him, named “Hellbilly Cannibal.” Then they decided that instead of casting that character, they’d just ask Necro Butcher himself to play him.
Those wrestlers did know they were being filmed for a movie, and they had experience as entertainers, if not as movie actors. We can’t say the same for these next characters, who appeared to be customers buying food from Mickey Rourke at a deli because they really were customers buying food from Mickey Rourke at a deli. They didn’t recognize him, and they didn’t realize they were part of a movie till afterward.
That lends some authenticity to these scenes that you don’t get from most movies — and you definitely don’t get from most Aronofsky movies, which usually deliberately go for a heightened reality. And it leads to some dialogue that a writer wouldn’t come up with on their own. A customer asking for “two big breasts,” setting up Rourke to make a boob joke, might seem pretty forced if you planned it that way. But a customer actually saying that on their own, and Rourke ad-libbing the reply? Now that’s just perfect.
‘Good Will Hunting’ Cast a Teamster as Its Judge, Not Realizing He Was Mafia-Connected
Good Will Hunting actually stood a shot at having a huge budget and an all-star cast, with the studio wanting to try sticking known actors like Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio into the lead roles. That never quite came together, so they ended up scrambling to cast the parts, lucking into nabbing Robin Williams as a famous name. For a judge, they just cast someone from the Teamsters union, a man named Jimmy Flynn who’d never acted before.
Flynn would go on to score two other small film roles, in addition to his many credits as “transportation coordinator” due to his job with the Teamsters. That would be all we have to say about Flynn, except for the small fact that he was connected to the Irish mafia and was tried for murder.
Two men, Brian Halloran and Michael Donahue, were shot to death in 1982, and one of them ID’d Flynn as the killer with what was basically his dying breath. Flynn got acquitted, though, because the real killer was apparently famed gangster Whitey Bulger, wearing a Jimmy Flynn wig during the shooting. Bulger was later an inspiration behind Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, a movie that Flynn worked on as a Teamster and starred both proposed Hunting actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon.
Nic Cage’s ‘Joe’ Co-Star Was Homeless Before Being Cast, Died on the Street Pre-Release
In 2012, child actor Tye Sheridan starred in a movie where he played a boy with a troubled homelife who befriends a man he meets in the woods. Critics liked it, which surprised them, because the man was played by Matthew McConaughey, who had a reputation for starring in terrible movies. McConaughey’s character was named “Mud,” and the movie was named Mud.
In 2013, child actor Tye Sheridan starred in another movie where he played a boy with a troubled homelife who befriends a man he meets in the woods. Critics liked it, which surprised them, because the man was played by Nicolas Cage, who had a reputation for starring in terrible movies. Cage’s character was named “Joe,” and the movie was named Joe.
For the part of Sheridan’s father, Joe went with a random homeless guy who yelled at the scouts as they drove one day through Austin. His name was Gary Poulter, he had a head wound from a drunken fight he’d just been in and he seemed perfect for the part. They put him up in a Hampton Suites hotel during the production, and he could afford a place to live afterward. That’s him in the following clip (he’s the one who isn’t Nicolas Cage):
Then the guy got diagnosed with cancer. In February 2013, before the movie made it to theaters, he went on one of his drunken benders, and police found him dead of alcohol poisoning close to a homeless encampment. He had unzipped his pants to pee, then keeled over and died.
We’d heard about Hollywood grabbing people and then spitting them out afterward, but we didn’t realize the cycle happens quite this fast.
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