Actor Demands That Changed Movie Details

When actors reach a certain level of fame, with it comes the ability to shape a movie to their own whim, whether it's because they've built up an impressive level of experience or simply because of their sheer star power. It's the type of thing that happens in every office around the world, but when movie stars do it, audiences get to see the impact of their decisions. Sometimes these changes barely affect the movie—minor scene alterations, for example, or a different take on the delivery of a line. Sometimes, however, they can completely change the final product—for better or worse. We've gone behind the scenes of some of your favorite films to ferret out the stories of the many ways in which a star wanted something that wasn't originally in the script—and got their way. Here are some of the most memorable—and often amusing—examples of movies that were significantly altered by actors' demands.

Stars have all sorts of reasons for agreeing to take a role. Samuel L. Jackson, for example, admitted he only wanted to star in Snakes on a Plane because of its title—which he loved so much that when executives considered changing it to Pacific Flight 121, he personally intervened, telling them it was "the stupidest damn thing I ever heard."

Jackson also advocated for more violence and profanity, an issue because the studio envisioned Snakes as a campy PG-13 action movie. Eventually, they agreed with his more adult-oriented take and he agreed to re-shoots to secure an R rating—partly for the fans who'd already started freaking out over the idea of a Samuel L. Jackson movie titled Snakes on a Plane, and partly because that's what he'd wanted anyway.

Jurassic World earned largely positive reviews—and a whole lot of money—but more than a few critics and fans complained that Bryce Dallas Howard's character somehow outruns 22 tons of T-rex in high heels. Director Colin Trevorrow was keenly aware of how ridiculous this was, and reportedly spent much of the film's production trying to convince her to literally slip into something more comfortable. Howard staunchly refused, insisting that her character had to wear heels while outrunning that giant dinosaur. 

Trevorrow would later admit that he wasn't sure exactly why Howard was so insistent, but he respected her decision, musing that perhaps Howard "felt like surrendering the heels felt like surrendering the femininity of the character." Howard herself would later say she never expected wearing the heels to be such a major talking point, but she was happy to have the effort she put into running through the jungle acknowledged, noting that no camera trickery was used—she really did wear the shoes in every scene.

According to the original script for Pulp Fiction, everyone's favorite Bible-quoting hitman with a heart of gold, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), was supposed to sport a giant Afro that would stand in contrast to the slicked-back hair of his cohort Vincent (John Travolta). However, according to Jackson, the person sent to buy a wig had no idea what an Afro was, and returned from the store with one styled into a Jheri curl—something that infinitely amused the star. 

Rather than insisting on a replacement, Jackson decided to just roll with it, with the actor later telling MTV that as soon as he put it on he knew that's the way the character had to look. As he told writer-director Quentin Tarantino, "this is Jules."

According to the DVD commentary recorded for Gone Girl, the script called for Ben Affleck's character to try and hide his identity by donning a Yankees cap. Affleck, a lifelong Red Sox fan, absolutely refused to do this—and shut down production for four days over the disagreement. 

Director David Fincher tried and failed multiple times to convince the actor to change his mind, each time being told that Affleck's friends would never let him live it down if footage existed of him wearing a Yankees hat. As Affleck told the New York Times, he said to Fincher, "David, I love you, I would do anything for you. But I will not wear a Yankees hat." Fincher finally relented and suggested a compromise—a Mets hat.

After watching a rough cut of the Battle for Geonosis with Star Wars creator George Lucas, Samuel L. Jackson noticed it was hard to spot his own character, Mace Windu, amongst the dozens of Jedi on screen, and he asked Lucas if it'd be possible for Windu to wield a purple lightsaber—partly because it'd stand out more, and partly because purple is Jackson's favorite color.

Lucas initially turned down the request, explaining that lightsabers are generally only a handful of colors due to how they're made. Jackson countered by saying "I'm like the second baddest Jedi in the universe next to Yoda," presumably before pointing out to Lucas that the entire Star Wars universe existed in his head so he could make whatever changes he damn well felt like. This apparently swayed Lucas, who made the change—and later wryly noted to Jackson that his idea had "caused a s—storm online."

In the Hunger Games novels, Buttercup the cat is described as "hideous-looking" with a muddy yellow coat, half an ear missing, and eyes the color of rotten squash. It's a pretty distinctive description, which is why fans were kind of miffed when a black and white cat played the animal in the first Hunger Games movie. According to producer Nina Jacobson, she knew immediately that fans would be annoyed by the mistake, going as far as suggesting using digital effects to edit in a new cat in post-production. The studio shot down the idea, of course. 

As Jacobson expected, soon after the film's release fans complained about the error, with author Suzanne Collins personally expressing her annoyance in interviews. After seeing the reaction from fans and the author, the studio quietly recast the cat, although as director Francis Lawrence pointed out, not everyone was happy with the change. "It's funny because now people are split," he shrugged. "Some people think we should have continued on with what happened in the first movie. And some people are really happy. You never win."

The relationship between Michelle Rodriguez's Letty Ortiz and Vin Diesel's Dominic "Dom" Toretto is the heart (or should we say "engine"?) of the Fast & Furious franchise, but their love story nearly crashed right out of the gate. The Fast & The Furious was set to feature a love triangle between Dom, Letty and the late Paul Walker's Brian O'Connor. It was a formulaic, but understandable choice — what better way to create tension between two dudes than fighting over a girl? 

But in Rodriguez's opinion, it was absolutely wrong. "They just followed the format without thinking about the reality of it," said Rodriguez. "Is it realistic for a Latin girl who's with the alpha-est of the alpha males to cheat on him with the cute boy? I had to put my foot down."

This took chutzpah. After all, Rodriguez wasn't a movie star at this point, and defiance could have gotten her fired or even sued. Thankfully, she had an ally in the film's star, Vin Diesel. "Vin was the first one to pull me to the side while I was crying, and he just looked at me and said, 'I got your back.' That was the beginning of the Letty fairytale."

And what a fairytale it was — the franchise earned a staggering $5 billion worldwide over its first eight installments, and behind all the money and muscle cars is Dom and Letty's love story. Almost makes you want to write a poem or steal a car.

When it came to making strange demands, Marlon Brando was the gift that kept on giving. Unless you were a director or co-star, in which case his whims could push you past the brink of your own sanity. While there are many examples of Marlon's madness to choose from, what makes Brando's bizarre behavior in The Island of Dr. Moreau so memorable is that he managed to make a weird movie even weirder.

Based on the H.G. Wells novel, Moreau has Brando playing the titular mad scientist, whose contribution to the field of bio-genetics is to create human-animal hybrids. If the storyline was already strange, Brando made it bonkers. He insisted that his character be allergic to the sun and caked in white makeup, creating the movie's most memorable visual. Brando also wore an ice bucket on his head, and when he took a liking to a two-foot-tall supporting actor, he demanded Moreau always appear with this identically dressed little person. Brando's demands turned what might have been a thought-provoking horror film into an eccentric expose of a movie star's hubris.

While Brando's madness dramatically changed the movie, it was co-star Val Kilmer's attitude that nearly broke director John Frankenheimer, who allegedly later vowed he wouldn't cast Kilmer again "even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer." Maybe he could have cast Brando instead?

"Cool World" is a half-animated-half live-action film that tells the messy story of a jailed artist (Gabriel Byrne) who creates a cartoon reality that he can escape into. In classic femme fatale fashion, a powerful 'toon, Holli Would (Kim Basinger), seduces and manipulates the cartoonist while a noirish cartoon-world lawman (Brad Pitt) tries to stop them from having sex, which would turn her into a human according to this movie's strange logic.

Though "Cool World" was released a full four years after "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," the blending of animation and live-action isn't executed to anywhere near the same level of quality. Even more pressing than any technical troubles, however, are the plot and tonal issues, which can be attributed directly to Basinger.

Director Ralph Bakshi was known for his underground animated films aimed at adults which were frequently rated R or even X, such as the cult classic, "Fritz the Cat." With "Cool World," Bakshi was going for another R rating, but Basinger demanded the movie be family-friendly, with her specifically wanting to show it to hospitalized children (via Dazed). Paramount agreed with Basinger but settled for a PG-13 instead of the PG she was looking for. Toning down the sexually-charged plot meant heavily re-writing the script, which was done without Bakshi's permission. He hated the whole ordeal and even physically attacked the producer who did the rewrite. Bakshi continued working in TV and on shorts, but he never made another feature film.

Marlon Brando was one of the most famous actors to ever live and played an important part in changing up the style of acting back in the 1950s. He was an undeniably talented icon but, at a certain point, he became arguably more trouble to work with than he was worth. His renegade behavior and constant demands gave headaches to plenty of the filmmakers he worked with. One of the films he caused the most trouble on was "The Missouri Breaks."

This 1976 Western stars Jack Nicholson as a horse thief and Brando as the man hired to hunt him down. According to The Guardian, Director Arthur Penn (of "Bonnie and Clyde" fame) caved to every demand made by Brando, who spent the entire production completely off the rails. Brando disregarded the script entirely, instead improvising his dialogue, characterization, and wardrobe with little rhyme or reason, or even consistency.

He adopts an accent for some scenes while forgetting it in others, rotates through an entire gallery of ridiculous hats and costumes, and even changes up his character's entire identity and personality between scenes. When viewing "The Missouri Breaks," it can feel less like you are watching a Western story and more like you are watching the uncontrollable whirlwind ravings of an eccentric actor to who nobody said "no."

The big gimmick that made "Spider-Man: No Way Home" such a phenomenon was the conflux of all of the big-screen "Spider-Man" actors coming together in the same movie. Alongside Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire as the three titular heroes, "No Way Home" also brought back the key villains from past films as well. This included Willem Dafoe's version of the iconic Green Goblin.

Much of Dafoe's big screen work is spent in the arthouse and independent worlds away from the big blockbuster superhero fare, so it was not a guarantee that he would reprise the role. Before agreeing to come back as the supervillain, he had two demands for director Jon Watts and Sony chair Amy Pascal. The first was that it needed to be a substantial part, not a cameo. And the second was that he had to be allowed to do his own stunts. Both demands were met. Dafoe had also done the majority of his own stunt work the first time he played the Green Goblin back in Sam Raimi's 2002 "Spider-Man, so he had a foundation of performing physically in this role to return to." 

From acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog, "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" is a historical epic about a group of conquistadores in search of the mythical golden city of El Dorado. Klaus Kinski stars as the titular character, and he and Herzog would wind up working together as director and star on four additional films, though each shoot was more than a little risky, and they nearly killed each other on this first outing.

Kinski has a reputation as a fantastic performer but also as an exceptionally incendiary individual. He was known to be volatile, destructive, and violent on and off of film sets, most horrifically sexually abusing his daughter Pola Kinski for years (per The Guardian).

Herzog knew Kinski from the time he was 13, and the two had an explosive love-hate relationship that saw near-constant screaming and physical attacks on their film sets, as chronicled in Herzog's documentary, "My Best Fiend." Herzog described Kinski as obsessed with money, and on their first collaboration, "Aguirre," he took up a full third of the budget with his salary alone. After shooting in the Amazon jungle had wrapped, Kinksi was needed to record some ADR lines. Because he hated the film, Kinski demanded $1 million for one and half days of ADR when he knew the budget had run dry and Herzog himself was flat broke at the time. This demand forced Herzog to loop some of Aguirre's lines with a voice actor doing a Kinski impression.

Sidney Lumet's 1975 heist film is an enduring classic of the genre. While most bank robbery movies focus on intricate plotting, suspense, and action, "Dog Day Afternoon" takes a decidedly different approach. Based on a true story, the film displays a commendable commitment to naturalism and is all about the interpersonal drama of those involved in the robbery, namely Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino).

After three weeks of rehearsals to explore the character and become comfortable in the role, Pacino felt like he still didn't have it nailed down. When the first day of shooting was in the can and they were looking at rushes, Pacino knew he had a major request to make. He wanted to throw out everything they already shot and start over from scratch. A night of hard drinking led Pacino to the key to why his performance wasn't working: his glasses.

Sonny was supposed to wear glasses throughout the film, but Pacino wanted to ditch them. As was recalled in his biography, "Al Pacino: A Life on the Wife," Pacino said, "No, hold it, he wouldn't be wearing glasses. Ordinarily he would, but on the day of the heist he would have forgotten them, because subconsciously he wanted to get caught." Demanding to reshoot an entire day's work for a seemingly minor costuming detail couldn't have been an easy sell, but Pacino's reasoning struck true with Lumet, and the glasses were left out of the film entirely and the first day was reshot.

"Vampire's Kiss" tells the story of a businessman's descent into lunacy after he thinks he is bitten by a vampire and is slowly transforming into one. The film is most notable for containing one of the absolute zaniest Nicolas Cage performances in a career chock full of bonkers, off-the-wall performances. The memeified scene where Cage manically screams the entire alphabet at a subordinate is surely the film's most infamous sequence, but clocking in at a close second is the moment when he eats a cockroach that he finds in his kitchen.

In the planned freak-out scene, Cage was initially supposed to down some raw eggs, but he didn't think that went far enough to shock audiences. Cage wanted to swap out the eggs for a cockroach and demanded that it be a real, live cockroach instead of a prop. The director, Robert Bierman, relented, and Cage ended up eating two cockroaches on set. Even more extreme, Cage also demanded that he get bit for real by a live bat on camera. He fought hard to get an actual bat, but they proved impossible to control and potentially lethal, so Cage didn't have his demand met on that one.

The expansive "Fast & Furious" action franchise is full of tough, macho actors, but their egos might be a little more fragile than one might expect. In "The Fate of the Furious" and other movies in the most recent phase of the series, stars Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson all shared the same demand: they each refuse to lose a fight (per The Wall Street Journal).

Diesel is a producer on the mainline series, The Rock and Statham both produced their spin-off, "Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw," and all three are big enough stars that they have the power to override the intentions of the franchise's various screenwriters and directors. Each has a stipulation in their contract that prevents them from ever losing a fight on screen or from even taking too many blows in a single fight before coming out on top.

If that sounds like it would get in the way of the story and action choreography, it does. The action is explicitly choreographed around these demands and every hit they take is counted and balanced out. One particularly petty demand from The Rock required a scene to be reworked so that he could be sitting upright on the floor at the end of a fight instead of lying flat on his back, apparently because that would have made him look too weak.

"The Shawshank Redemption" was a septuple Oscar nominee  and holds the distinct honor of being the number one highest-rated movie of all time on IMDb. The film is an adaptation of the Stephen King novella, "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," and tells the story of an innocent man (Tim Robbins) who is sent to prison for several years, his friendship with an older inmate (Morgan Freeman), and his eventual escape attempt by tunneling out of his cell.

Freeman had a couple of hardline stipulations during the making of "The Shawshank Redemption." At first, he nearly turned down the role after reading a single page of the book when he saw his character was Irish. When he was convinced to embrace the ethnicity switch, he still had an issue with one scene in the script: the ending. The original final scene of the film was supposed to feature Freeman on the beach playing the harmonica that Robbins had given him, but Freeman refused and demanded the scene be changed.

He told New York Daily News that he considered the scene "sort of asinine, sort of cliched, sort of unnecessary." He also refused to do as many takes as director Frank Darabont wanted and tried to get them to change the film's title to include the mention of Rita Hayworth to match the full title of King's novella. Darabont gave in and cut the harmonica bit from the ending, but the shortened version of the title stuck around.

"American History X" is a 1998 drama about a neo-Nazi (Edward Norton) who changes his ways after a stint in prison and makes an effort to reform his little brother (Edward Furlong) before he is irreparably stuck in the same destructive mindset. This drama was the fourth feature film of Norton's career and it proved to be a defining role and earned him an Academy Award nomination. However, Norton's impressive performance came with some baggage behind the scenes.

He was only credited as an actor in "American History X," but Norton's involvement ran much deeper. At the time of filming, Norton had a reputation for taking over productions and making major creative demands that his directors didn't always agree with. This was the case between Norton and director Tony Kaye as well. Norton did heavy re-writing on the script, which was mostly done with his director's blessing, but Norton's demands soured once they reached post-production.

Norton convinced distributor New Line Cinema to let him oversee an alternate edit of the film without Kaye, which wound up being the officially released version. As Kaye explained in an op-ed for The Guardian, the studio granted Norton's every demand and began disregarding Kaye because Norton was much better at articulating his opinions. Their behind-the-scenes feud boiled to explosive heights with Kaye going as far as to try to get his name taken off the final film because it was no longer his vision by the time Norton was finished.