Actors Who Were Fired And Replaced During Filming

Everyone who's ever been fired from a job knows it can be a truly traumatic experience—and it's even worse if you're replaced in your role at the company instead of simply seeing the position eliminated. Although it's easy to forget how insecure acting can be as a profession, the threat of being fired and replaced often looms just as large for our favorite stars—even after they've gotten the part.

Landing a high-profile movie role doesn't always guarantee you'll actually be featured in the picture. Just ask any of these actors, who were famously—some might say infamously—fired from their roles and replaced mere weeks, or even sometimes days, after cameras started rolling. How could that possibly happen, and what's a Hollywood star to do after losing a part they thought they had in the bag? Read on to find out, and prepare to see some of your favorite movie characters in a whole new light.

In the Oscar-winning movie Her, the computer operating system that Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with was initially voiced by actress Samantha Morton. All went smoothly—until the film's team got to the editing room.

"Samantha was really involved in giving Joaquin [Phoenix] a lot...to work from. And then when we got into editing, we realized that what Samantha and I had done together wasn't working for what the character needed," director Spike Jonze revealed at the 2013 AFI Fest (via HitFix). "So, we ended up having to recast at that point in time." Morton's eventual replacement: Scarlett Johansson, who filmed her dialogue around her Captain America schedule, according to the Los Angeles Times.

A League of Their Own star Lori Petty was unceremoniously fired by producer Joel Silver after just two days on the set of Demolition Man, reportedly over "creative differences." Her replacement: a young star named Sandra Bullock. Petty later spoke about her firing in a 2014 interview with The Daily Beast, calling it "the most uncool day in Hollywood" and adding, "I just treat people the way I want to be treated, so I'd rather not gossip about his unkindness."

Actor Kel O'Neill was the original actor hired to play Eli Sunday, a.k.a. the nemesis of Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. But according to The New York Times Magazine, O'Neill had to be replaced about halfway through the film's 60-day shoot. What went wrong? According to the Times, there were reports that O'Neill "suffered from intimidation," presumably from Day-Lewis' Method approach to acting.

Both Day-Lewis and director Paul Thomas Anderson have since denied this; "It just wasn't the right fit," Anderson told the Times, while Day-Lewis gave a more long-winded answer to L.A. Weekly. Whatever the case, O'Neill didn't work out and was ultimately replaced by Paul Dano, who earned a BAFTA nomination for his work in the role.

Friday the 13th has never had a reputation for being what you'd call a star-making franchise. In a practical sense, the long-running movie series is less of an ongoing narrative and more of a kill delivery system, serving up audiences an assembly line of fresh-faced young actors to be skewered, smashed up, and slain by Jason Voorhees.

This pattern had been in place for a while by the time the series' eighth entry, Jason Takes Manhattan, swam to shore in 1989. The movie follows a group of seniors celebrating graduation on a boat en route from Crystal Lake to New York City. One of the student roles, Sean Robertson, was originally played by actor Lee Coleman; A few days into the production, however, the filmmakers started to get cold feet regarding Coleman's casting, and made the decision to fire and replace him. It was Coleman's first major film role, and a typically cold introduction to the Hollywood machine.

"He seemed a little uncomfortable," said writer-director Rob Hedden in the documentary Crystal Lake Memories, talking about the decision to recast. "The chemistry with him and the Rennie character wasn't quite there. Thank God for the producers, because they really said, 'There's a problem here, and if we don't correct it now, we're going to have a bigger problem.'"

Coleman only shot a few scenes before being replaced by Scott Reeves, thereby missing his chance to star in the worst Friday the 13th movie this side of Jason X.

If you ask a million people what their favorite Disney animated movie is, you'll likely hear the title Chicken Little approximately zero times. The 2005 theatrical feature is the 46th animated movie from the House of Mouse, and holds the distinction of being the first fully computer-animated movie in the studio's library. As far as that benchmark is concerned, it's no Toy Story, but it's cute enough for what it is.

Disney got pretty far into production with actress Holly Hunter voicing the lead role of Chicken Little before the decision was made to pivot the movie into more of an action-packed adventure, and reimagine the protagonist as a boy instead of a girl. After eight months of voiceover work on Hunter's part, she was replaced with Scrubs lead Zach Braff, with his voice being pitched up in post-production.

Critically, at least, the decision to rework the movie didn't really pay off, with Chicken Little sporting a direct-to-DVD worthy 37% score on Rotten Tomatoes. 

If Hunter has any hard feelings about being kicked out of the coop for the project, they haven't stopped her from continuing to work with the company. Having also put her talents to much better use as the superheroine Elastigirl in the 2004 Disney/Pixar adventure The Incredibles, she returned for another go-around as the character in its 2018 sequel Incredibles 2.

Hugh Jackman single-handedly made Wolverine into an iconic role through his soulful, sorrowful portrayal of the nigh-unkillable mutant in the X-Men franchise. But when the first X-Men movie entered production in 1999, Jackman quite literally wasn't in the picture. 

Originally, the cigar-chomping role of Logan was to be played by Scottish actor Dougray Scott, but his participation in the superhero movie was held up by production delays on John Woo's Mission: Impossible II. 

Production on X-Men had already begun while Scott was working on the Mission: Impossible sequel, but the combination of that movie's delays and a shoulder injury made it impossible for him to make it to work on time. After a month's worth of filming with the rest of the movie's cast, Scott was set to join the production for his scenes on October 18. Just over a week before his expected arrival, it became clear that the arrangement wouldn't work, so Fox brass began a speedy search for a replacement Wolverine.

A then barely-known Hugh Jackman was cast in the role on October 11, being ushered into his breakout role in a last-minute whirlwind. It's mind-boggling to consider how much would be different if the Mission: Impossible sequel's production had run on time — many careers and movies would have been affected. It just goes to show that in the movie business, as with everything, it's not just skill that gets you to the top. More than anything else, success comes down to good timing and good luck.

For a creative industry, the movie business can be awfully risk-averse — particularly when it comes to casting decisions — so the majority of actors who find themselves fired and replaced during filming tend to be less well-known. It isn't completely out of the ordinary for a bankable star to end up out of a gig, however — just ask Julianne Moore, who had the lead role in 2018's acclaimed Can You Ever Forgive Me? before the picture's screenwriter and original director, Nicole Holofcener, decided to go in a different direction.

Moore revealed the circumstances of her departure in early 2019, while promoting her role in Gloria Bell. Saying she hadn't seen Forgive Me? because it was still "too painful" but wasn't upset with the picture's eventual star, Melissa McCarthy, Moore described her firing as a simple matter of creative differences.

"I think she didn't like what I was doing," Moore said of Holofcener. "I think that her idea of where the character was, was different than where my idea of where the character was, and so she fired me."

Even for Hollywood's biggest stars, it can be painful to be fired from a project — especially one that goes on to the type of widespread acclaim and awards season buzz enjoyed by this one. But Moore's still an Oscar-winning talent, and Gloria Bell brought in some of the biggest critical raves of her career, so all's well that ends well.