8 Actors Who Were Fired or Left the Set and Were Replaced Quickly

Actors are being fired or they drop out from projects very often and it doesn’t mean that they are not talented enough. It happened to Judy Garland and even to Natalie Portman in Romeo + Juliet. The important part is that a new fit is found and a movie is finished and given to the public for consumption.

Bright Side has found 8 cases where actors were fired during the filming of a movie and were replaced by someone else.

1. Megan Fox was replaced by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.

In 2009, Megan Fox was fired from Transformers: Dark of the Moon after she told the media that Michael Bay, the director of the movie, was a nightmare to work with. She was asked by the producers to apologize, but she refused, something that led to her replacement. She hasn’t taken back what she said about him, but she realizes now that she shouldn’t have acted the way she did back then. So, it was Rosie Huntington-Whiteley who took her place in the movie.

2. Anne Hathaway was replaced by Katherine Heigl.

Anne Hathaway was hired to star in the movie Knocked Up alongside Seth Rogen. However, she disagreed with the decision to show real footage of a woman giving birth just to create the illusion that she is giving birth. That’s why she chose to walk away from the project. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Kate Bosworth auditioned to replace her, but the role went to Katherine Heigl.

3. Dougray Scott was replaced by Hugh Jackman.

Dougray Scott was supposed to be Wolverine in the first X-Men movie back in 2000. However, he was already filming Mission Impossible 2, and while he made his best to make time for both movies, Tom Cruise put the brakes on him. Scott himself has said that it wasn’t an injury that kept him from being Wolverine, but Cruise who wouldn’t let him. In the end, he was replaced by Hugh Jackman who was emblematic in the role.

4. Harvey Keitel was replaced by Martin Sheen.

During the filming of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola decided to fire his lead man, Harvey Keitel, because he felt he wasn’t good for the job. Coppola said that he felt Keitel wasn’t comfortable filming in the jungle. Keitel himself has said that he wasn’t afraid of being in the jungle, but there is no bad blood between the two men. Martin Sheen was hired to replace Keitel, something that Coppola still believes was the perfect decision for the movie.

5. James Purefoy was replaced by Hugo Weaving.

Purefoy was already filming V for Vendetta for a month before he decided to walk away from the movie. His reason was that he couldn’t act for the entire film with his mask on. That was a big setback for the director, who replaced him with Hugo Weaving but kept Purefoy’s scenes in the final cut. That was because it would take too much time to re-shoot everything.

6. Nicole Kidman was replace by Jodie Foster.

Prior to filming The Panic Room, Nicole Kidman had worked on Moulin Rouge, which had left her with a lingering knee injury. That kept her from having the fitness needed for her role, and she decided to drop out. Jodie Foster was hired in her place, who found out that she was pregnant 5 weeks into filming. The shooting went fine, but the crew had to be extra careful with her during her stunts.

7. Colin Firth was replaced by Ben Whishaw.

Colin Firth was planned to be the voice of Paddington Bear, but the producers weren’t happy with how his voice sounded. The decision to leave the project was amicable and Ben Whishaw was hired to fill Firth’s voice. At first, Whishaw was reluctant because he had a bad similar experience in the past and he wasn’t sure if he would be good enough. But he finished the job and the results were exactly what the producers were looking for.

8. Julianne Moore was replaced by Melissa McCarthy.

Julianne Moore was cast to star in the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me?, but she was let go due to creative differences. That was a nightmare at first, but things went back on track after Melissa McCarthy was recruited to do the job. She made the role completely hers and it’s impossible to imagine how Julianne Moore would’ve looked in it. The movie itself was praised and McCarthy earned an Academy Award nomination.

Can you imagine how different these movies would have been if the other actors had actually starred in them?