Roles Actors Weren't Prepared For

Just as with any job, acting can be tough if you don't know what you're doing or fail to prepare correctly. Of course, when an actor falls down on the job, it can be a little worse than your typical bad day at the office; for starters, he or she has the added pressure of having the whole thing go down on camera. And that isn't the only thing that sets acting apart from other professions — what an actor is expected to do on any given day when they show up on the set can vary dramatically depending on the project they're working on. As a result, there are countless stories of actors being hilariously outmatched by the requirements of their roles due to time constraints, overconfidence — and sometimes, just plain old bad luck. Here's a look at some of the most noteworthy roles that actors just  weren't prepared for.

Benedict Cumberbatch has played everything from a cocky American neurosurgeon/wizard to a giant CGI dragon, in addition to a host of more traditional roles that include Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, and Frankenstein's monster. With such an impressive and eclectic résumé, you'd think voiceover work would be a cinch; as it so happens, though, Cumberbatch has a very peculiar and adorable acting Achilles' heel: a total inability to say the word penguin, which he instead pronounced as "peng-wing."

Cumberbatch apparently wasn't aware of this, seeing as how in 2009, he took a voiceover gig for the BBC documentary South Pacific, in which he struggled to pronounce the word almost every single time. In an interview on the The Graham Norton Show, a visibly embarrassed Cumberbatch admitted that he had no idea he couldn't pronounce the word, and was kind of amazed that nobody working on the documentary bothered to correct him.

During the press tour for Pompeii, a historical romantic epic set against the backdrop of a volcanic eruption marketed to the public with endless shots of Kit Harington's abs, Harington coyly revealed that he'd taken "the script as gospel" when it came to the city of Pompeii and the eruption that destroyed it, trusting it to be historically accurate.

After the film wrapped and premiered, Harington, who admitted that he felt kinda bad about doing no independent historical research prior to filming, decided to remedy his lack of knowledge by actually visiting the city. Pleasantly surprised at how accurate the film had been, he talked about how surreal it was to actually walk around a city after spending months walking around a fake version.

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

Unfortunately, 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, including alcohol, and both had to be coached on how to act convincingly high, drunk, or a combination of the two. In fact, DiCaprio was so unsure about how to act, he'd later admit that he spent hours watching this 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 also on hand during production in case he had any questions.

To a lot of people, Hugh Jackman is Wolverine, and the actor put an astonishing amount of effort into physically portraying the character during his lengthy tenure as the character. This is especially notable in later movies in the X-Men series, where Jackman is noticeably more muscular than he was in the first film in the franchise.

Jackman has since noted that he was actually pretty embarrassed by his physique in the first X-Men movie, explaining that he figured he'd be able to get in shape with just a few weeks of preparation. Director Bryan Singer didn't agree, and pushed his shirtless scenes to the end of shooting four months later when he saw his progress—or lack thereof. Even then, Jackman still admits that those scenes were pretty embarrassing, considering how buff he looked over a decade and a half later.

Fans and critics alike took issue with the subpar fight choreography of Marvel's Iron Fist and its seeming reliance on excessive cuts to hide actor Finn Jones' apparent lack of martial arts skill—a fairly major problem, considering Iron Fist is supposed to be a master of all forms of unarmed combat, as well as the fact another Marvel series, Daredevil, had a fight scene in which the titular character backflip-kicks bikers half to death for five minutes straight with only a handful of carefully hidden cuts. 

Jones later explained that he literally had just 10 minutes to learn the choreography for his fight scenes—and only three weeks to train before filming started, explaining why the guy who physically bested Shou-Lao the immortal dragon with his fists was in worse shape than a blind lawyer.

When Jackie Chan first arrived in the U.S. in the 1980s, he was reportedly unable to speak even basic English and quickly set about teaching himself how to communicate by absorbing Western media. To facilitate this it's noted that Chan's employer at the time, Golden Harvest, sent him to America alone so he could "immerse himself in the English-speaking world" and learn the language that way—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 learn English commendably well, he still had trouble reading scripts as late as the Rush Hour series, and had to learn 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 infer that he liked horse pornography.

Loosely speaking, most of the actors in Games of Thrones have accents roughly 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 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 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.