5 Movies Actors Were Tricked Into Making
Once you reach a certain level in Hollywood, you have your pick of projects. You’ve paid your dues, proven your worth and don’t have to play the best friend in D+ rom-coms anymore. That’s all the more incentive, however, for others to convince you to do so, occasionally through sneaky maneuvers ranging from slightly underhanded to out and out fraud. That’s how A-listers ended up unwittingly signing onto…
X-Men: The Last Stand
The trap that ensnared Halle Berry is actually what convinced director Matthew Vaughn to quit the third X-Men movie. According to Vaughn, before Berry committed to filming, he noticed a script that was “a lot fatter” in an executive’s office than the one he’d previously seen. When he asked about it, he was told it was intended for Berry because “this is what she wants it to be, and once she signs up, we’ll throw it in the bin.” It seems like they might have been better off just using the script with a beefier role for an Oscar-winning actress, but we’re not the ones with the 56 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.
The Watcher
Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, got tricked with a much bigger part than he wanted. In fact, he was only ever kind of considering playing a serial killer in 2000’s The Watcher because it was a tiny part, as a favor to the director, a former roadie for Reeves’ band. When the role was unexpectedly expanded (but not the pay), Reeves bowed out, but a contract signed by him mysteriously surfaced anyway. It turned out that a person Reeves would only identify as “a friend” had forged his signature, but he determined that it would have been too much of a financial headache to prove it and just did the stupid movie. Again, it seems like they could have simply paid the beloved movie star whatever they paid his presumably now ex-friend.
Gone Girl
Tyler Perry is apparently allergic to money, which honestly explains his whole career. When he accepted the role of the skeevy lawyer in Gone Girl, the only halfway decent movie he’s ever done, it was only because he somehow didn’t know who David Fincher was, how popular his work is and how highly anticipated the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel was, “because when things are that magical for people and they become very special for people, there’s a lot of pressure for it to be what they want it to be.” That’s kind of on Tyler Perry, except his agent intentionally concealed those facts from him. They just wanted to get paid for once.
Dogville
You know how, sometimes, you hype up an event to a friend precisely because you know it’s gonna be kinda lame and that’s why you want them there? That was how Stellan Skarsgård felt about 2003’s Dogville, but instead of “kinda lame,” it was “being screamed at by Lars von Trier.” He talked his friend Paul Bettany into joining the cast by insisting the atmosphere was “like a party all the time,” only to confess after “three weeks and not a bit of fun” for Bettany that “I was making it up — I just couldn't face doing it without you." The man needed his emotional support Paul.
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
In the early ‘90s, there were no (literally) bigger box office draws than Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, and the battle for the title of least intelligible action hero occasionally got heated. “I felt like the only way I could catch up with him is if he (had) a stumble,” Schwarzenegger later said, so when he heard Stallone was considering the absolute turd of a comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, he told his agent to tell his agent that he wanted the role. Once he thought he was in competition with Schwarzenegger, Stallone made his move, and Schwarzenegger made Terminator 2. Imagine being outsmarted by the star of Jingle All the Way.
