45 Iconic Movie Scenes Where Actors Weren’t Acting
Recently, Reddit user thefirstlaughingfool asked the folks at r/MovieCritic to share their favorite moments an actor wasn’t “faking it” onscreen, and they submitted a ton of great examples. Here are some iconic movie moments that were way realer than you realized.
1.
Thomas Jane really stabbed Kevin Nash in The Punisher scene where Frank stabs The Russian. “I guess one of the stunt coordinator guys didn’t change the real butterfly [knife] with the retractable [knife],” Nash later recalled. He actually stayed in character after being stabbed. “I’m not going to go, ‘Jesus!’ because I don’t want to kill the scene,” he explained. Turns out, Jane had stabbed him in the collarbone, and there was only a bit of blood, as the blade had been squared off.
2.
The child actors in The Goonies did not see the pirate ship until they filmed the scene where the characters see it for the first time, meaning their amazed reactions were real. Josh Brolin actually ruined the take because he was so shocked by the ship. “Spielberg wanted our genuine reactions on set,” Brolin revealed. “There was no CGI in those days so they kept the ship under wraps so they could capture us seeing it for the first time. It took ages to set up, and as we surfaced the water and turned to look at the ship, I shouted, ‘F**k!’ Spielberg shouted, ‘Cut!’ I had blown it.”
3.
Similarly, the child actors really were seeing the inside of the chocolate factory for the first time in this Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory scene.
5.
The cast’s reactions to the chest-burster scene in Alien were genuine, as they didn’t know what was going to come out of Kane’s chest. This actually caused actor Veronica Cartwright to faint.
6.
Speaking of Alien — in the fourth film, Alien Resurrection, Sigourney Weaver actually did make the shot where she throws the basketball over her shoulder.
7.
Bill Murray actually is really good at bowling, just like his character in Kingpin — in fact, the scene where he manages three strikes in a row? Murray really managed that (in front of a live audience, no less!), and the crowd’s reaction was genuine.
8.
Similarly, Michelle Pfeiffer personally decapitated all those mannequins in Batman Returns — it wasn’t a stunt person. In fact, she did it in one take. “I got really good at that whip,” she later revealed. “I was very pleased with myself because it was something that my stuntwoman actually couldn’t do that I could do.” You can watch the clip of her doing it all in one take here.
9.
And in Happy Gilmore, when Shooter makes his final shot in the Tour Championship, he actually really got the ball in — and his celebration and “choke on that, baby” was real. “I begged our director Dennis Dugan to let me make that final shot,” Christopher McDonald, who played Shooter, recalled. “He gave me five tries.” The crew and extras actually took bets on whether or not he’d make it — which he did on the fifth take, causing his genuine celebration. “That was a really crazy ad-lib in response afterward, and it was very fun to do.” That was the take that ended up in the film.
10.
James Stewart was not meant to cry in this praying scene from It’s a Wonderful Life. He was overcome with emotion while filming: “As I said those words, I felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing,” Stewart later said. It had been his first role after returning from war. His tears made the moment even more heartfelt and genuine.
11.
In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, they really were waxing Steve Carell’s chest in the famous waxing scene. Everyone’s reactions were genuine — including Carrel’s. Also, Paul Rudd suspects the person waxing Steve had never done it before.
12.
The cigarette ash wasn’t supposed to hit McManus in the eye in The Usual Suspects — it was an accident, and Stephen Baldwin’s reaction is real.
13.
The laughing in the lineup scene wasn’t supposed to happen either — it was meant to be serious. “We were supposed to be very stoic, very unimpressed, unintimidated,” Kevin Pollak, who played Hockney, said. But: “We would lose it over and over and over.” Pollak also claimed in the DVD commentary that part of the reason they laughed was that Benicio del Toro “farted like 12 takes in a row,” which created genuine giggles and one of the most memorable scenes in the film.
14.
According to audio commentary for Scream, Skeet Ulrich didn’t mean to hit Matthew Lillard in the head when he slammed the phone down — the fake blood on his hand made it slip. Lillard then improvised his iconic line: “You fuckin’ hit me with the phone, dick!” Lillard’s genuine reaction was so good that it was kept in.
15.
Also, in Scream, when Sidney (dressed as Ghostface) stabs Billy with the umbrella, Skeet Ulrich’s cries of pain are real. According to Wes Craven in the movie’s audio commentary, “Skeet, when he was 10 years old, had open heart surgery, and there’s one place in his chest where there’s a stainless steel wire, where if you touch it, it’s excruciating. And we had him completely padded up on this so that when he gets stabbed by this collapsing umbrella, he would be protected. And, of course, the stuntwoman, because the mask is so difficult to see through, stabs him right on the spot and misses the pad entirely.”
16.
In A Knight’s Tale, the crowd was supposed to cheer at Chaucer’s speech. However, many of the extras did not speak English and didn’t realize it was time for them to cheer. Mark Addy then started cheering in a genuine effort to get the extras to join in, which worked. The moment was so funny that director Brian Helgeland kept in.
17.
Costar Hank Azaria revealed that Robin Williams’ fall in The Birdcage was real and accidental. “If you watch that little piece of film again, you’ll see me laughing and Robin laughing. It’s one of those things that happens that you never really think they’re going to use, but I was so emotionally upset in the scene — I was supposed to be crying — that I just pretended that he was making me cry even more. But I was actually laughing.”
18.
Alan Rickman was dropped early in his character’s death fall in Die Hard. He was being held up with a rope and was told he would be dropped at the count of three. Instead, he was dropped on one, and his shocked reaction is real.
19.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin slicing open his hand in Django Unchained was accidental — DiCaprio actually sliced it and kept going with the scene despite the bleeding, leading to the memorable moment where he wipes blood on Kerry Washington’s face (this was fake blood, as they’d cut in between).
21.
In Foxcatcher, Channing Tatum was meant to hit the mirror, but he wasn’t meant to break through it. He ended up headbutting it so hard that he broke not only the mirror but the drywall behind it. “When we took the mirror down, there was a hole in the wall,” director Bennett Miller revealed. And he actually cut himself, and you see his blood in that scene. This was somebody uncorking something that you can’t make up. It’s inside you somewhere, or it’s not.”
22.
In what would become an iconic moment, a stormtrooper extra clearly hit his head in this scene from Star Wars: A New Hope. Fans loved the silly moment, and it seems it was intentionally left in, as there’s a sound effect to accompany it. The actor who claimed to be the stormtrooper, Laurie Goode, said he was distracted by an upset stomach and figured he wasn’t in the frame when the bump occurred or that a different take would be used.
24.
Edward Norton also actually punched Brad Pitt in this scene from Fight Club after director David Fincher told him to.
25.
Michael Cera and Rihanna were really hitting each other in this scene from This Is The End. After Cera told Rihanna he was going to slap her butt for real, Rihanna said she would slap his face for real too. The slap was strong, too — after six takes, he said he didn’t think he could do another.
26.
This Pearl Harbor scene from Tora! Tora! Tora! featuring people running from an exploding plane that happened by accident. This wasn’t supposed to happen, and the stunt people running from the flames were really running for their lives. The footage was that much more terrifying because it was real. “Shrapnel was flying everywhere,” stunt person Phil Adams said, describing what it was like to film the sequence. “It was probably some of the best footage that we shot that day.”
27.
Malcolm McDowell’s eyes were really held open in this scene from A Clockwork Orange — he was given anesthesia, but it wore off. “The lid locks kept sliding off my eyelids and scratching my cornea,” he revealed. “When the anesthetic wore off, I was in such pain I was banging my head against a wall. But Stanley [Kubrick] was mainly concerned about when he would be able to get his next shot.” McDowell actually went temporarily blind as a result. He then had to do it again for the close-ups. This is all seen in the final footage.
28.
In The Princess Bride, Christopher Guest, who played Count Rugen, actually knocked out Cary Elwes, who played Westley, in the scene where Rugen hits Westley on the head with his sword. The take was used because “it was the only one that looked so real,” Elwes said. “Chris [Guest] swung the heavy sword down toward my head. However, as fate would have it, it landed just a touch harder than either of us anticipated. And that, folks, was the last thing I remember from that day’s shoot,” Elwes revealed. “I woke up in the emergency room, still in costume, to the frightening sound of stitches being sewn into my skull.”
30.
Martin Sheen later admitted he was actually “dangerously drunk” and having a real breakdown in the breakdown scene from Apocalypse Now. His character punching the mirror, causing heavy bleeding, was unscripted. It remained in the final cut.
31.
Rocky and Drago’s fight scene in Rocky IV was much realer than you probably realized. Sylvester Stallone told his costar, Dolph Lundgren, to truly try to knock him out so that it would look more realistic. “At one point, he hit me so hard on the top of the head I felt my spine compress,” Stallone later revealed. “He then hit me with an almighty uppercut. That night, my chest and heart started to swell, and I had to be helicopter-ambulanced from my hotel to a nearby emergency room. I was told that Dolph had punched my rib cage into my chest, compressing my heart. If it had swollen any more, I would have died.” Stallone was in the ICU for nine days.
32.
In Practical Magic, the actors really were drunk in parts of the midnight margarita scene. “We had to reshoot a scene where it was far away, and we were on our backs, and Nicole just put the bottle on the table and said, ‘You know what? There’s no reason we shouldn’t be drunk here.’ And I said, ‘You know what? That’s true,'” Bullock later recalled. “We were a little drunk.”
33.
Similarly, Matthew McConaughey really was high in Dazed and Confused when his character says, “Watch the leather, man,” and starts cracking up because he’s high. Also, it’s a real joint — just for that take.
34.
The scene in Mrs. Doubtfire where Daniel sticks his face in a cake to avoid being recognized was planned — but the crew didn’t realize the heat from the lighting would melt the frosting, causing it to fall into Mrs. Sellner’s tea.
35.
In the scene where Michael J. Fox’s character gets hanged (before Doc saves him) in Back to the Future Part III, Fox actually got hanged. A stunt double was used for the wide shots, but Fox himself did the close-ups. He was initially standing on a box, but the swinging wasn’t realistic, so he offered to go without the box and use his hands to keep the rope from suffocating him. On the third take of doing this, Fox “miscalculated the positioning of [his] hand” and quickly passed out. Everyone thought he was just acting and did nothing for a few seconds until director Robert Zemeckis realized the truth.
36.
The same thing happened to Brendan Fraser in The Mummy. He was directed to “sell it” more, so on the next take, he stood extra high on his toes — and the rope was pulled higher up. “The next thing I knew, my elbow was in my ear, the world was sideways, and there was gravel in my teeth,” Fraser said. Luckily, he was alright.
37.
Isla Fisher almost drowned for real while filming the water tank scene in Now You See Me. Her release chain got stuck in her costume, meaning she was stuck for the three-minute sequence. “I was actually drowning,” she told Chelsea Handler on Chelsea Lately. “Everyone thought I was acting fabulously. … no one realized I was actually struggling.”
38.
Aubrey Plaza was really masturbating in this scene from The To-Do List. “It was a full body shot. And I asked the director, ‘What should I do?'” she revealed to Conan O’Brien on his late-night show. She says the director told her to “‘masturbate — like it says in the script,'” so she she went for it.
39.
Robert Pattinson was also really masturbating in The Lighthouse. The director, Robert Eggers, revealed, “On day one, we shot Rob masturbating in the shed — it’s the very first thing we shot — and Rob really, really went for it.”
41.
Real bees were used in the scene where bees emerge from Candyman’s mouth in Candyman. Star Tony Todd wore only a dental dam to protect himself so the bees would not fly directly down his throat, but he was still stung many times. “I negotiated a bonus of $1,000 for every sting during the bee scene. And I got stung 23 times. Everything that’s worth making has to involve some sort of pain,” Todd revealed.
42.
In The Hateful Eight, Kurt Russell smashed an antique 150-year-old guitar (it was supposed to be swapped out before they actually filmed the smashing), causing Jennifer Jason Leigh to shout in shock and turn towards the camera, as she knew they hadn’t swapped it yet. Her panicked reaction was real, and it was kept in the film. “It ended up being great for the scene, but very sad for the guitar, and for my guitar teacher, and for me,” Leigh later said.
43.
Natalie Portman truly had her head shaved on camera in V for Vendetta — though apparently, her reaction wasn’t real, as she loved the cut. “I was really excited to get to shave my head — it’s something I’d wanted to do for a while, and now I had a good excuse,” she later said.
44.
So did Anne Hathaway in Les Misérables. “Tom did not ask me to do it,” Hathaway revealed, referring to director Tom Hooper. “It was something I wanted to do for a long time, and I knew it was something the character did.” However, she found the experience emotional and difficult. “Cutting my hair reduced me to like mental patient-level crying. I was inconsolable,” she revealed.
45.
And finally, Lenny Montana was so terrified to act alongside Marlon Brando that he tripped up on his lines in the scene where his character Luca Brasi greets Don Corleone. Coppola saw this and decided to make his anxiety a part of his character, adding an additional scene in which Brasi practices greeting Don Corleone. This made Brasi far more layered and memorable.
