5 of the Funniest Reasons Actors Were Fired from a Movie
Casting is an arduous process to ensure the right actor gets the right role, but sometimes, things don’t work out. The chemistry is off with the rest of the cast, the studio needs a bigger name, the director decided the character should have a shaved head but a bald cap killed his parents, etc. Sometimes, however, the reason is truly ridiculous.
Mark Wahlberg Decided Donnie Darko Should Have a Lisp
Wahlberg was initially cast as the lead in 2001’s Donnie Darko, but once director Richard Kelly found out his vision for the character included a pronounced lisp, he was out. It’s probably just as well, as Wahlberg was already straining credulity as a teenager in Boogie Nights four years earlier and Jake Gyllenhaal hadn’t yet become Taylor Swift’s most hated ex.
Ryan Gosling Changed Too Much for ‘The Lovely Bones’
Wahlberg later benefited from another actor-director misalignment. To prepare for the role of the Salmon family patriarch of The Lovely Bones, Gosling gained 60 pounds because “I really believed he should be 210 pounds.” The problem was he didn’t tell director Peter Jackson, who made his displeasure known when Gosling showed up to set looking like a completely different person.
Damon Wayans Sabotaged His ‘Saturday Night Live’ Job
Wayans did a brief stint on Saturday Night Live in 1985, but according to him, he was constantly given “stereotypical or offensive” roles in other members’ sketches while his own were invariably cut “for time.” Instead of quitting, however, he plotted to get fired in spectacular fashion by performing a sketch “like a very effeminate gay guy,” resulting in his termination “pretty much as he walked off the stage.”
‘Man With a Plan’ Viewers Couldn’t Tell Jenna Fischer From Pam Halpert
Playing a character as iconic as Friends’s Joey Tribbiani or The Office’s Pam Halpert is a double-edged sword: You enjoy incredible fame and fortune while you’re on the air, but you risk getting typecast forever after. For Fischer, it was even worse. After she and Matt LeBlanc filmed the pilot for Man With a Plan, the overwhelming sentiment among test viewers was, “Pam wouldn’t marry Joey.” LeBlanc was the star, so Fischer was left to dry her eyes on her Peacock residuals.
Tony Hawk Was Too Manly to Be David Spade’s Stunt Double
We mostly know him as a grown video game star, but Hawk graduated to professional skateboarding around the time most of us were graduating middle school. By 1986, at 17 years old, he was good enough to be tapped as Spade’s stunt double for a complicated skateboarding sequence in Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol. Before filming commenced, however, Hawk slammed into puberty, growing to 6-foot-2 overnight. Basically, he no longer looked like a little boy, which meant he no longer looked like Spade, though he can still be seen from the knees down in one shot because his replacement was nowhere near as good of a skateboarder. It’s undoubtedly the highlight of his resume.
