Movie scenes that actors regret doing
Acting is a profession that requires a lot of versatility and willingness to test boundaries. In the act of immersion, sometimes things are done that the actor himself would never even consider, yet it must be played as natural. Often, this bravery pays off with a critically acclaimed performance that's lauded for years or even becomes cinematic history. Sometimes, however, it results in a complete nightmare for everyone involved. Here are some particularly painful examples of the latter.
Burt Reynolds' Deliverance from a pain free existence
Deliverance is a classic drama about man against nature (and other man), but it's infamous for a scene too graphic to discuss here. Strangely enough, the only open regret from any of the actors comes from one who broke his butt a completely different way. There's a scene in which the canoe Burt Reynolds' character is paddling goes over a waterfall. Director John Boorman wanted to use a dummy, but Reynolds wasn't having it. Being literally the condensed essence of 1970s masculinity, he insisted on performing his own stunts and went down the waterfall himself, landing on rocks that shattered his tailbone. Adding insult to injury, all that verisimilitude didn't even create a more lifelike effect.
"He said his shoulder really hit a rock, and his head hit another rock," comedian Norm Macdonald told Howard Stern in 2016. "And then he said the next thing he remembered was he was way down stream, all of his clothes were torn off. [...] Next thing he remembers, he's waking up in the hospital, John Boorman's at his bedside. And he goes, 'I said to John, how'd it look… on the dailies?' And John Boorman said, 'It looked like a dummy falling over a waterfall.'"
Kate Winslet's autograph agony
Titanic was a massively successful romantic dramatization of the sinking of the titular ship. It's full of memorable moments, including a scene in which Kate Winslet's Rose character asks Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack to "draw me like one of your French girls." It's a passionate moment showing her character overcoming the disapproval of her fiancée and mother to claim her own agency and embrace the man she's fallen in love with. Yet even now, weirdly obsessive fans try to get her to sign pictures of herself naked, and she'd love for that to stop.
"I don't sign that picture", she told Yahoo! News. "It feels very uncomfortable. Why would you do that?" Winslet is now 41, a happily married mother of three and a multiple award-winning actress. She finds herself baffled by why certain members of her fanbase are so obsessed with this one particular image decades later.
Taylor Lautner would like his shirt back, please
Taylor Lautner played the werewolf character Jacob in the Twilight series. His lycanthropic transformations were accompanied with the removal of his clothes, giving fans of the series many opportunities to view his fit, muscular body. Many, many more opportunities than he was ever comfortable with.
"If I had to choose, I would never take my shirt off again in a movie," Taylor has elaborated, "but I guess that's not very realistic. I certainly won't be asking to do it, though."
While he takes pride in the effort he put in to get the physique shown off in the films, he worries that it gets in the way of people appreciating the work he put in to polish his acting craft. He doesn't want to be seen as "just a body," but a competent actor that's qualified for non-beefcake roles.
Even Eva Mendes gets intimidated
Once Upon a Time in Mexico concludes director Robert Rodriguez's "Mexico Trilogy" with Johnny Depp playing CIA agent Sheldon Sands and Eva Mendes as a sadistic AFN operative who betrays him. They wind up kissing before the former shoots the latter dead. It's a pretty epic scene.
Mendes does have one particular regret about that sequence, however. Seems she'd been harboring a long crush on Depp, and wishes the kiss had been drawn out longer. "I was so intimidated by him," she explained.
Terence Stamp's missing scene partner
In The Phantom Menace, the first of the much-maligned Star Wars prequels trilogy, much of the film takes place establishing various debates in the Galactic Senate that lead to the establishment of the totalitarian Empire that dominates the original trilogy. Terence Stamp plays Chancellor Valorum, who's ushered out in favor of the secret Sith Lord Palpatine by a vote of "no confidence" from Queen Amidala, played by Natalie Portman. It's about as exciting to watch as an actual Senate hearing, but it's important to the overall plot (or what passes for one).
Stamp was excited at first by the idea of working alongside Portman, confessing an admiration for her. However, when he actually arrived on set, Portman was nowhere in sight, and he was directed to a piece of paper taped to the wall and told that was for all purposes the "actress" he was expected to dialog with. His disappointment was palpable. "It was just pretty boring," he was reported to say later.
Jennifer Lawrence's soused sex scene
Passengers is a science fiction adventure starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. Despite that megawatt cast, it didn't do very well in the box office, partly thanks to the revelation of a crucial plot twist that makes the film significantly darker than it looks. The disturbing fact that a crucial plot point involves a startling disregard for the consent and personal autonomy of one of the characters isn't helped by Lawrence admitting she spent the sex scenes too drunk to remember doing them.
She had jitters about the shoot because it was going to be her first time filming a sex scene and also felt guilty about doing so with Pratt, who was married. "I got really drunk," she admitted, "But that led to more anxiety because I was like 'What have I done? I don't know'… And it was gonna be my first time kissing a married man, and the guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach."