Ryan Gosling & 12 Other Stars Who Were Fired During the Filming of a Movie

Ryan Gosling had a very specific idea of how his character — grieving father Jack Salmon — should look in The Lovely Bones. So, he put on 60 pounds by drinking melted Haagen-Dazs ice cream, among other things. “We had a different idea of how the character should look,” Gosling said in a roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I really believed he should be 210 pounds.” 

However, director Peter Jackson disagreed. “We didn’t talk very much during the pre-production process, which was the problem,” Gosling added. “It was a huge movie, and there are so many things to deal with, and he couldn’t deal with the actors individually. I just showed up on set, and I had gotten it wrong.” He was dropped from the film days before production began. “Then I was fat and unemployed,” Gosling concluded. 

However, Jackson’s wife Fran Walsh claimed that it wasn’t really about the weight. “Ryan came to us two or three times and said, ‘I’m not the right person for this role. I’m too young,’” she said. “And we said, ‘No, no, no. We can age you up. We can thin your hair.’ We were very keen.

“It wasn’t until we were in pre-production and we had the cast there that it became increasingly clear: He was so uncomfortable moving forward, and we began to feel he was not right. It was our blindness, the desire to make it work no matter what.”

One of the biggest urban legends surrounding the making of The Lord of the Rings movies is Stuart Townsend’s firing one day before filming started. The actor was initially brought on to play Aragorn in The Fellowship of the Ring, and it's commonly believed that he was considered too young and/or too difficult to work with. Townsend spoke up about the experience in an interview with Entertainment Weekly (via The Irish Independent).

"I was there rehearsing and training for two months, then was fired the day before filming began," Townsend, who was 28 at the time, told the outlet. "After that, I was told they wouldn't pay me because I was in breach of contract due to not having worked long enough. I had been having a rough time with them, so I was almost relieved to be leaving until they told me I wouldn't be paid.”

"I have no good feelings for those people in charge, I really don't,” he added. “The director wanted me and then apparently thought better of it because he really wanted someone 20 years older than me and completely different." Viggo Mortensen, who was 42, ultimately took on the role.

Harvey Keitel was only a week into shooting Apocalypse Now when director Francis Ford Coppola replaced him. He was replaced by Martin Sheen, and the movie went on to be widely acclaimed. In an interview with Business Insider, Keitel cleared up rumours and revealed the real reason he was recast. 

"I'm not sad about anything and I don’t resent anything except there has been a blurring of the truth," the actor said. "I'm not upset with Francis. He did what he felt he had to do. But there's a blurring of the truth and I don't feel good about that."

"I believe in the book on the making of the movie they said Harvey Keitel didn't like the jungle; didn't want to stay in the jungle," he explained. "Well, Harvey Keitel spent three years in the United States Marines Corps in the jungle.”

Keitel doesn’t seem to have much luck when it comes to certain films. Director Stanley Kubrick is known for being a perfectionist, and one common story which was spread by the likes of Gary Oldman suggests that Keitel hit his limit after shooting a scene in which he had to walk through a door 68 times. However, while Oldman claims that Keitel quit at this point, the actor himself told a different tale.

In a 2016 interview with Andrew Marr, Keitel put an end to decades of speculation after admitting he was indeed fired by Kubrick from Eyes Wide Shut. He remarked that while the director was a “genius,” he did some things Keitel “objected to,” and acted in a way that he found “disrespectful.”

While we can’t imagine anyone else but Michael J Fox playing Marty McFly in Back to the Future, the part initially went to Eric Stoltz. Although Fox had been eyed for the role from the start by director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale, Syfy reported that Universal head Sid Sheinberg wanted Stoltz for the role. However, this later proved to be the wrong decision. Interviews with cast members in the book ‘We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy’ (via a Variety extract) suggest that the actor's seriousness proved to be a mismatch with the film, which was going for a comedic vibe. 

Zemeckis said in a 2012 CBC interview that choosing to replace Stoltz was a “horrific decision.” He said: "Eric is a brilliant actor. I simply miscast him and I learned a very serious lesson. It’s not worth it. It’s too painful for everybody. What you have to do is cast the movie the right way and feel really right about it.”

In V For Vendetta, James Purefoy was initially drafted in to play the lead role. As part of his character, V wears a Guy Fawkes mask. It’s widely believed that Purefoy’s departure was linked to how he apparently couldn’t stand wearing the mask, but this isn’t necessarily true. It is true that director James McTeigue previously said Purefoy “wasn't comfortable in the mask” and that he couldn’t “make peace with it,” but in a CBR interview, he gave the true reason for his exit.

“James is a great actor,” he said. “I hope that we can work together at some time in the future. At this point, it wasn't right and Hugo [Weaving] [is] a great actor.”

Just a month before Ridley Scott’s All The Money In The World was released, some troubling allegations against star Kevin Spacey came to light. The director took swift action and replaced the disgraced actor with Christopher Plummer. It took nine days of reshoots to fully replace Spacey, but in an interview with The Guardian, Scott made it clear that this was the obvious choice.

“My decision was almost immediate. I said, ‘We need to redo this,’” he recalls. “I didn’t agonise. I never dwell on a problem, only the solution.”

Over the years, there have been several rumours surrounding Jean-Claude Van Damme’s firing from Predator. However, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the acclaimed actor revealed that it all came down to the suit he was expected to wear for the role. “My head was in the neck,” he said. “My hands were in the forearms, and there were cables. My feet were in his calves, so I was on [stilts]. It was a disgusting outfit.” This outfit almost restricted his movement, so, when he was asked to attempt a jump, he refused, saying it was too risky. 

According to Van Damme, when a stunt double did the jump instead, he got injured, which led to the suit being redesigned. First assistant director Beau Marks refutes this, though. “We shot some [footage], sent it back to the studio, and the decision came back that we were to shoot everything we could without the creature in the suit, and we were to go back and redesign [the creature],” Marks explains to the outlet. “And when we went back to redesign it, we went to Stan Winston. And Stan decided that the way to do the suit is to start with the tallest, biggest guy he could find, not someone who was the agile mover that Van Damme was.”

Samantha Morton was initially recruited to voice AI system ‘Samantha’ in Her. However, she was later replaced by Scarlett Johansson. In an e-mail to Vulture, director Spike Jonze said: “I think, unfortunately, it’s pretty normal in terms of my not-quite-painless-for-everyone-involved ‘process’ of discovering what the movie is.”

“Samantha was with us on set and was amazing,” he added. “It was only in post production, when we started editing, that we realised that what the character and the movie needed was different from what Samantha and I had created together. So we recast and since then Scarlett has taken over that role.”

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet originally starred Natalie Portman as the titular character along with Leonardo DiCaprio. However, with Portman being just 13 at the time, it was eventually decided that she was too young to star opposite DiCaprio in romantic scenes, especially given he was 21-years-old.

In a 1996 interview cited by the Daily Mail, Portman explained: “It was a complicated situation and it had to do with [our ages] and it wasn't appropriate in the eyes of the film company or the director, Baz.”

“And it was kind of a mutual decision that it just wasn't going to be right at the time and I think the film came out really, really beautifully and Claire [Danes] did a really, really beautiful job,” she added. “It just wasn't the right time, you know?”