Roles Actors Weren't Prepared For

Just as with any job, acting can be difficult if you fail to prepare correctly. But when an actor falls down on the job, it can be a little more public — and permanent — than your typical bad day at the office. 

What an actor is expected to do on any given day can vary dramatically — perhaps they're expected to recite a lengthy monologue, execute a dance number, move like a ninja or convincingly portray an athlete in peak condition or a famed personality the audience is already expecting to move, look, and speak a certain way. It's often a well-paid gig, but there's a good reason why it pays so well – a tiny micro-percentage of human walking the planet can pull it off with professional, convincing precision.

It's no surprise, then, that there are countless stories of actors being hilariously overmatched by the requirements of their roles, often due to lack of preparation. Sure, sometimes excuses can be made for time constraints, overconfidence — or perhaps, just plain old bad luck. Nevertheless, the proof is in the pudding – and forever enshrined on their IMDb page. Here's a look at some of the most noteworthy roles actors simply weren't prepared to play.

During the press tour for "Pompeii," the notorious 2014 historical epic set against the backdrop of a volcanic eruption — and marketed to the public largely as a showcase for Kit Harington's abs — the "Game of Thrones" star coyly revealed that he'd taken "the script as gospel" when it came to the city of Pompeii and the eruption that destroyed it. Which means, much like Jon Snow, he knew nothing.

After the film wrapped and premiered, Harington said he felt bad about not having done any research prior to filming. Because he had since gone there, and seen how much he missed.

"I didn't have time before we started shooting," he explained to the BBC in 2014. "I know it's bizarre, but I went after we wrapped. I wanted to go to this place that I'd be pretended to be in for so long."

"Then I went to all the exhibitions and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were very historically accurate," he added. "I mean, we're a big-budget action movie and we're bound to take historical liberties. But [we didn't take] many."

Taika Waititi admitted he didn't prepare to play Adolf Hitler in the quirky 2019 drama "Jojo Rabbit," which he wrote and directed. In many ways, this lack of preparation helped his out-of-left-field performance.

Waititi told Deadline the version of Hitler in the film was a child's imaginary friend, not the detestable historical figure. "I didn't have to do any research, and I didn't do any research. I didn't base him on anything I'd seen about Hitler before," Waititi told Deadline, adding, "I just made him a version of myself that happened to have a bad haircut and a s***** little mustache. And a mediocre German accent."

Waititi hadn't planned to cast himself in his adaptation of the children's book "Caging Skies," but the studio pushed for it. "You start [out] thinking of bigger stars to be part of a film like this or to play an imaginary Hitler," Waititi told Variety. "But at the end of the day, it came down to the simple fact that if we had done that, that would have overshadowed the heart of the story, which is this beautiful story, this relationship story between these two kids."

It's hard to imagine a movie about a 10-year-old boy who is an active member of the Hitler Youth and idolizes Hitler as the protagonist of a heartwarming story, but Waititi walked the tightrope with both his film and performance, delivering something many viewers deemed charming and original. "Jojo Rabbit" won the Audience Award at the Toronto Film Festival, and Waititi won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite not doing a lick of research for his satirical role.

Leonardo DiCaprio's character does a lot of drugs in Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street," all of which have differing effects on the human body, from giving you the energy to making you so relaxed you flop down a flight of stairs like a fish. 

According to the stars, however, neither DiCaprio nor his co-star Jonah Hill were all that familiar with the effects of most of the drugs they were supposed to pretend to take, and both had to be coached on how to convincingly act high. In fact, DiCaprio was so unsure about how to act, he'd later admit that he spent hours watching a YouTube video of a guy drunkenly rolling around on the floor to better shape his performance. As a final measure to help DiCaprio really get into the role, a seasoned "drug expert" was on hand during production in case he had any questions.

"I saw this stuff literally every day when I was 3 or 4 years old," DiCaprio said in 2014. "So Hollywood was a walk in the park for me.... I'd go to parties and it was there and, yeah, there's that temptation. Hollywood is a very volatile place where artists come in and they essentially say they want to belong. It's incredibly vulnerable to be an actor and also get criticism at a young age when you're formulating who you are. We've seen a lot of people fall victim to that, and it's very unfortunate."

Busy movie stars have to frequently serve as air-traffic controllers, shifting their schedules to accommodate productions that are shifting their own schedules to accommodate other talent. This happened to rising star Ana de Armas when she found herself caught between Bond and a blonde.

First, the Cuban-born actress spent a year preparing to portray Marilyn Monroe in Netflix's "Blonde." When production dates shifted, de Armas jumped at the chance to appear in the James bond film "No Time to Die," even if it meant she wouldn't have time to properly train for the physically demanding film.  

"I went to London, and I only had like 10 days to two weeks of training," de Armas told Entertainment Weekly. "Which is not much for everything I had to do, which made me very nervous." 

Suddenly, 007 Daniel Craig came up injured, so the "Bond" shoot was postponed and de Armas went back to playing Monroe in the drama. "All that training I did [for Bond]," she recalled, "was kind of gone and forgotten."

When it was time to get back to the realm of Ian Fleming, de Armas had to rely on muscle memory.

"I went straight from 'Blonde' to shoot for Bond," de Armas told Harper's Bazaar in 2021. "I didn't have the time to actually commit to any kind of diet or workout or training because my schedule just didn't allow for it. Those few days that I did have some training — I had the gun training and learned the choreography for the scenes [...] it was a short but really intense immersion into the Bond universe, so I quickly transformed into a CIA agent." 

Viggo Mortensen had very little time to prepare to play Aragorn in "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring." Mortensen was cast after filming had already begun on Peter Jackson's ambitious, epic fantasy trilogy. Jackson had fired Stuart Townsend one day before filming began, replacing the Irish actor with Mortensen at the last minute. Mortensen was initially quite reluctant to take on the role, as he hadn't read the Tolkien books and had no time for preparation; Mortensen's son Henry, however, a big fan of Tolkien's books, convinced the actor to take the role.

Mortensen had the flight to New Zealand to prepare. "I relaxed a bit as I started reading the book but then once I landed I got very nervous all over again," Mortensen admitted in 2020. 

"I felt unprepared," he said to Yahoo a year later. "The other actors had been there for weeks and months in some cases preparing for the arduous task of shooting the whole trilogy. I also felt awkward, because I'd never been in a position of replacing another actor."

Mortensen got right to work when he arrived in New Zealand. "The first thing I did when I landed was learn how to do the sword fighting required," Mortensen told Yahoo. Despite playing catch up with the other actors, he became a consummate swordsman while filming the "LOTR" trilogy. According to The Guardian's obituary for Bob Anderson, the legendary swordmaster proudly called Mortensen "the best swordsman I've ever trained."

Billy Burke admitted he hadn't even heard of the Twilight Saga when he was approached about playing Charlie Swan. 

"I had no idea what 'Twilight' was, at all. Catherine Hardwicke had seen a movie that I did a number of years ago, called 'Dill Scallion,' and she requested to have me in," Burke explained to Collider in 2010. "I came in and we talked a little bit about it, and we read a couple of scenes. In the movie sense, we both fell in love, at that moment."

"I've been told that Charlie is more prominent in the next book," he added in another 2008 interview with MTV. "I haven't read the books, surprisingly enough ... I read bits and pieces of 'Twilight' as we were making it. I'm just not a good reader, so I haven't been able to sit down and get myself through an entire book in my whole life." 

Burke added that he prefers to not get bogged down with too much backstory. "I'm a guy who likes to make it up as he goes along."

Burke also wasn't prepared for the franchise's rapidly-developed, rabid fan base. "I've been working in this business for a long time and these kind of things only come along once in a while where it becomes a part of popular culture. There are a lot of worse things to be than Charlie Swan," Burke told Independent in 2010. "When I read the script, I had the idea the movie would become a success, I didn't think it would become this juggernaut."

When Jackie Chan first arrived in the U.S. in the 1980s, he was reportedly unable to speak even basic English' he quickly set about teaching himself how to communicate by absorbing Western media. 

To facilitate this, Chan's employer at the time, Golden Harvest, sent him to America alone so he could "immerse himself in the English-speaking world," a method that resulted in Chan once apparently believing a menu to be an important English document he couldn't read, resulting in a frantic late-night call to his agent.

Although Chan did eventually learn English well enough to make a proper American run at stardom in films like "Rumble in the Bronx" and the "Rush Hour" films, he still had trouble reading scripts even later in his career, learning the lines for many of his Western films phonetically. Sometimes, crews would take advantage of this and make Chan say swear words or things he didn't mean — like in "Rush Hour 3," when someone made him imply that he liked horse pornography.

Christopher Plummer had no time to prepare for his role in "All the Money in the World" because, well, it was kind of unprecedented. 

In the thick of the #MeToo-fueled reckonings that rocked Hollywood, Spacey was fired from the film about the 1973 J. Paul Getty kidnapping that had the oil tycoon refusing to pay ransom for his grandson. What complicated matters was that Spacey played Getty — and the film had already wrapped production.

A scrambling Ridley Scott tapped Plummer to replace Spacey, with plans to reassemble the cast for nine days of reshoots alongside the new Getty. Scott offered to let Plummer watch the scrapped Spacey footage, but the "Sound of Music" legend declined.

"It doesn't do an actor any good to watch someone else," he explained. "When you take over a part in the theater, it's better that you don't go and see it first so you're not influenced in any way, the role comes from you. I saw some of the kidnapping stuff, which I thought was very well done, but that's all I saw. Bits and pieces that didn't involve J. Paul Getty at all. I hadn't seen the trailer [with Spacey] either."

Plummer (who died in 2021) played several few notable historical figures during his career, including novelist Rudyard Kipling, journalist Mike Wallace, and acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. It makes sense, then, that he had developed a method for such roles.

"The thing I learned very much is to try and look and move like the creature you're playing, and try to get their voice if you can," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "But don't over-makeup or do too many tricks because then it looks like an imitation." Despite having little time to prepare, Plummer was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in the film. 

Loosely speaking, most of the actors in "Game of Thrones" have accents based on where in the fictional world of Westeros they hail from, relative to the U.K. For example, characters hailing from the North have thick Northern accents, whereas those from the South speak with accents more commonly found in the more southerly parts of the U.K.

Though not a firm rule, by any stretch of the imagination, production was insistent that the actors playing the sons of Ned Stark should adopt Sean Bean's native Yorkshire accent. According to one rumor, Bean was asked if he'd put on an accent, and he said no. Kit Harington had no idea that this would be expected of him, and auditioned for the role of Jon Snow in his native southern accent, only to be told while he was good for the character, he needed to speak more like Sean Bean. Harington — along with the rest of the actors expected to portray Ned Stark's sons — reportedly had only a short while to learn to emulate Bean's distinctive voice, with Harington arguably managing it best.

Fans and critics for the most part praised "Daredevil," "Luke Cage," Jessica Jones" and the other "Defenders"-orbiting series that came as a result of the Netflix/Marvel partnership of the mid-2010s. Then came "Iron Fist."

Aside from representation issues, the big knock on Danny Rand's live-action debut was in its subpar fight choreography, and the blatant rapid-cut editing frequently employed in an attempt to cover it up. Such excessive cuts appeared to be concealing "Game of Thrones" actor Finn Jones' lack of martial arts skills — a major problem, considering Iron Fist is supposed to be a master of all forms of unarmed combat. This was only exacerbated by the fact that another Marvel/Netflix series ("Daredevil") had been praised for its fight scenes, including a now-legendary 3 minute hallway battle that was shot with minimal, carefully-hidden cuts. 

Jones later explained that he had mere minutes to learn the choreography for his fight scenes — and only three weeks to train before filming began. 

"Well, here's the situation," he told the Telegraph in 2017. "Unfortunately, with the filming schedule, I wasn't given as much time as I would have liked to continue the training ... I was learning those fight scenes just 15 minutes before we shot them, because that was the schedule... It would be 2am, 3am, I'd just done a long day of work, and usually the stunt department would come up and say 'Hey, right, we've got this huge 30 person fight and you've got to learn it right now.' So I was learning it on the spot, within 15-20 minutes, and then shooting it. That was the reality for six months."

Many Marvel fans weren't buying the excuse. The proof appears to be in the pudding: Years later, while Charlie Cox, Jon Bernthal and Vincent D'Onofrio have made the jump to the MCU, and some fans are still clamoring for Krysten Ritter and Mike Colter, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone hoping to see Finn Jones and his rapid-edit fight scenes ever again.

Ewan McGregor didn't read Jane Austen's novel "Emma" before taking on the role of Frank Churchill in the 1996 adaptation, starring Gwyneth Paltrow. McGregor thought he was terrible in the role, and many would agree. 

"I made the decision to do that film because I thought I should be seen to be doing something different from 'Trainspotting.' My decision-making was wrong," McGregor told The Guardian. "It's the only time I've done that. And I learned from it." 

"It's a good film, 'Emma'," he added. "But I'm just... not very good in it."

Typically, McGregor is an actor who prepares thoroughly for his roles. To play Mark Renton in "Trainspotting," the Scottish actor lost 30 pounds and shaved his head to look convincing as a drug addict. For "Moulin Rouge," he joined the rest of the cast for a two-week dancing and singing workshop six months before production began. McGregor was equally dedicated to portraying Curt Wild and embodying the swagger of a rock star in Todd Haynes' glam-rock fantasy "Velvet Goldmine." "I said I would only do it if he let me do all my singing live so that I could live out my Liam Gallagher fantasies," he told Yahoo in 2021. "[I wanted] to get it out of my system. So I did." 

In 1999, the world almost lost Martin Lawrence, when the comedian actor collapsed and fell into a coma outside his L.A. home due to severe heat-related exhaustion. Lawrence's condition was so serious that for several days he required a ventilator just to breathe, and there was talk of him potentially suffering permanent kidney or brain damage. Fortunately, he went on to make a full recovery.

As Lawrence would recall on "Conan" in 2015, it happened because he thought working out while wearing a plastic running suit in 100-degree weather would help him prepare for "Big Momma's House."

"I don't do that no more," he laughed. "I did that, and I went into a coma and passed out. Please, I recommend, do not run in a plastic suit. I was trying to lose weight; I used to box, and that's my training, running and wearing plastic. I just picked the hottest day of the summer. Next thing I know, I was asleep on the ground."