12 Iconic Movie Characters Who Were Disastrously Recast

5. Norman Bates - Vince Vaughn

The Film: Psycho (1998)

In The Original: Anthony Perkins

No matter how you feel about Anthony Perkins' performances in the awful Psycho sequels, his work as Norman Bates in the original movie was stunning. The whole twist of the film was built on Perkins' ability to sell a lie convincingly - the lie of Bates as an upstanding member of the community who was just as terrorised by his mother as the victims.

And thanks to his idiosyncratic but easy charm, Perkins was just likeable to convince - making the grand reveal at the end of the film all the more impactful. He went from being an unassuming, stuttering wall-flower to being a fully-fledged monster.

The 1998 remake made a lot of mistakes - shooting in colour and trying to copy the original too closely, chief among them - but it was always going to struggle with Vince Vaughn playing Bates. He wasn't capable of anything like the creepy, unnerving unevenness of Perkins' performance, and he'd already built a professional image as a fast-talking douche-bag swinger (mostly thanks to Swingers), with those whiffs of coolness too difficult to shake off.