Fire festival: 15 times big actors got booted from big movies

On paper, quintessentially English actor Colin Firth—known for his distinguished performances in Bridget Jones’ Diary and Kingsmen: The Secret Service—should have been perfect to play the also quintessentially English character Paddington Bear. The little cub has a statue dedicated to him at the train station of the same name in London, after all. However, as Paddington began to take shape, both the star and director Paul King started to believe that a younger-sounding voice was needed for the part. “It’s been bittersweet to see this delightful creature take shape and come to the sad realization that he simply doesn’t have my voice,” Firth told Entertainment Weekly in 2014.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that Mikaela Banes—and the woman who played her, Megan Fox—was around to stay in Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise, given that she was one of just two lead human characters (alongside Shia Labeouf’s Sam Witwicky). But then Fox compared Bay to Adolf Hitler in a 2009 interview with Wonderland magazine. Executive producer Steven Spielberg, who is Jewish and who suffered through horrible anti-Semitism during his childhood and who directed Schindler’s List, took exception to the comment and pressured Bay to fire the actress from the Transformers threequel Dark Of The Moon. Fox was replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, ostensibly playing a different character but filling the same role as Witwicky’s no-nonsense girlfriend.

In 1974, a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone starred in The Lords Of Flatbush, a drama about greasers in 1950s New York that also featured Henry Winkler as a pale imitation of his Happy Days character, The Fonz. Future Pretty Woman co-lead Richard Gere was supposed to appear alongside Stallone—but the pair just didn’t get along. “One day, during an improv, [Gere] grabbed me (we were simulating a fight scene) and got a little carried away,” Stallone told Ain’t It Cool News in 2006. “I told him in a gentle fashion to lighten up, but he was completely in character and impossible to deal with.” Gere was eventually replaced by Perry King.

In The Lovely Bones, the role of Jack Salmon—played by Mark Wahlberg as a father grieving the murder of his teen daughter—originally belonged to Ryan Gosling. The likely Oscar-nominee for Barbie was swapped out, however, when he gained 60 pounds to portray the character, which director Peter Jackson wasn’t a fan of. “We had a different idea of how the character should look,” Gosling told The Hollywood Reporter in 2010. “I really believed he should be 210 pounds. We didn’t talk very much during the pre-production process, which was the problem … Then I was fat and unemployed.”

In The Truman Show, Ed Harris plays Christof, the showrunner of a TV series about the fabricated life of central star Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), who’s completely oblivious to his onscreen fame. Dennis Hopper portrayed the character when filming commenced in 1997, before swiftly being fired. According to Hopper, director Peter Weir and producer Scott Rudin had a pre-existing pact that, if they both disliked the actor’s performance, they’d replace him. Considering the former Easy Rider star was dismissed just two days in, we know what the pair clearly thought of him. Harris took the role after many, many others—reportedly including Jack Nicholson and Jonathan Pryce—declined.

Imagine being a hair’s breadth away from seeing yourself in one of the greatest movies ever made. This is something Pulp Fiction’s Harvey Keitel has been through. The Tarantino favorite was famously taken out of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and replaced with Martin Sheen. In 2021, Keitel was interviewed by Insider and shot down a long-standing rumor that he was fired because he hated shooting in the jungle. “I believe in the book on the making of the movie [Coppola’s Monster Film: The Making Of Apocalypse Now] they said Harvey Keitel didn’t like the jungle; didn’t want to stay in the jungle. Well, Harvey Keitel spent three years in the United States Marines Corps in the jungle.”

Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet was a vibrant, modern take on the Shakespeare play that affirmed the rise of both its director and its male lead, Leonardo DiCaprio. Initially cast to play Juliet was Natalie Portman—despite the fact that she was just 13 at the time. And that was the problem. “Leonardo was 21,” Portman explained (via HelloGiggles), “and it wasn’t appropriate in the eyes of the film company or the director, Baz. It was kind of a mutual decision too that it just wasn’t going to be right at the time.” A 17-year-old Clare Danes replaced Portman, but roles in the Star Wars prequels and V For Vendetta later followed, so … she did alright.

The Can You Ever Forgive Me? we know, a tragicomedy starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant, was actually the second attempt at making that film. Originally, screenwriter Nicole Holofcener sought to direct a version with Julianne Moore and Chris O’Dowd, until Moore got fired and the project was abandoned six days before shooting was due to start. According to sources talking to The Hollywood Reporter, Moore was insistent on wearing a fake nose, but Holofcener thought the prosthetic would be distracting. Grant later confirmed this: “Julianne Moore wanted to wear a fat suit and a false nose … and Nicole Holofcener said, ‘You’re not going to do that.’”

Edward Norton played Bruce Banner/The Hulk in the 2008 Incredible Hulk—a film that very much didn’t live up to its title, receiving mixed reviews and a muted box office response. Also, apparently, the star was a nightmare to work with. He reportedly skipped early promotional events and, according to Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, just didn’t have a “collaborative” mindset. Thus, Norton was gone by the time Marvel was ready to work up The Avengers, replaced by Mark Ruffalo. “Our decision is definitely not one based on monetary factors,” Feige said, “but instead rooted in the need for an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members.”

It’s hard to imagine there was a time when Michael Biehn wasn’t meant to play Hicks in Aliens. He’s an old James Cameron favorite, after all, and accustomed to playing dystopian badasses thanks to his role in The Terminator. However, the role initially belonged to James Remar. The Warriors and Sex And The City actor reportedly lost his job for misbehaving on set, firing something out of a prop gun that blasted a hole through the Little Shop Of Horrors set next door. There were questions over whether Remar had live ammunition on him and—after a secondary offense of later being busted for possession of illegal drugs—he was gone.

Most actors on this list were fired before filming began or shortly after it started. Kevin Spacey was fired from All The Money In The World after he’d finished. The actor played American industrialist J. Paul Getty, who, despite being a billionaire, once negotiated with his own grandson’s kidnappers over a ransom. But then the former House Of Cards actor was accused of sexual misconduct, and director Ridley Scott reshot all of Spacey’s footage with Christopher Plummer in nine days, less than six weeks before the movie’s release. “It would have been a pity if the film were completely neglected because of what happened,” Scott reasoned.

For Michael J. Fox, Marty McFly is a signature role, still synonymous with the actor almost 40 years after he first portrayed him onscreen. But it nearly went to someone else. Originally, Eric Stoltz had the part, before being fired over creative differences with director Robert Zemeckis. Stoltz’s McFly was reportedly much more dramatic and less “screwball” than what was envisioned, letting Zemeckis default to Fox, who he’d initially sought to play the lead anyway. Given that Back To The Future was an instant hit and remains a rabidly adored ’80s masterpiece, he may have been onto something.

Everybody’s second-favorite piece of Lord Of The Rings trivia—after, “You know Viggo Mortenson broke his toe, right?”—is that the role of the ranger Aragorn initially didn’t belong to Mortenson. Stuart Townsend, of Queen Of The Damned and The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen fame, first played the part. However, he was dismissed after suffering some intense behind-the-scenes nerves, which he apparently overcompensated for by seeming hyper-confident around his co-stars. When Gandalf himself, Ian McKellen, asked Townsend, “You do want to be in this film, don’t you?” it apparently sealed the actor’s fate in the eyes of director Peter Jackson. Townsend was gone a week before he was scheduled to start shooting.

Before 7-foot-2 George Washington University basketball player Kevin Peter Hall stepped into the costume of the title villain in 1987’s Predator, it was supposed to be Jean-Claude Van Damme beneath the paint and mandibles. The reasons as to why the Muscles From Brussels didn’t stick around are still confusing more than 35 years later. According to Beau Marks, Predator’s first assistant director, the alien suit that Van Damme wore didn’t please producers: they said shooting should continue on as many human-only scenes as possible while the Predator was redesigned. Effects whizz Stan Winston “decided that the way to do the suit is to start with the tallest, biggest guy he could find,” thrusting the 5-foot-9 Van Damme to the sidelines.

In 1990, Warren Beatty both directed and starred in an adaptation of 1930s comic series Dick Tracy. Sean Young of Blade Runner fame was initially cast as Tracy’s girlfriend, Tess Trueheart, before being fired a few days into filming. Young claimed that she was dismissed because she wouldn’t sleep with Beatty—however, Deborah Ruf, the mother of Beatty’s young co-star Charlie Korsmo, denied this and claimed that Young was just too demanding. She was replaced in the role of Trueheart by Glenne Headly. In 2021, Young stated in an interview that her career was sabotaged by directors, including Beatty, who unfairly labeled her as “difficult”.