8 Iconic Movie Characters That Were Mostly Improvised

7. Sergeant Hartman - Full Metal Jacket

There may not be a single performance in the history of war movies that stands above R. Lee Ermey's incessantly vulgar Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. It's a work of brilliance that simultaneously acts as both a shocking comedy monologue and, eventually, a squirm-inducing plot device. Ermey's lines from Full Metal Jacket are without a doubt the most memorable, and so it would be easy to assume that Stanley Kubrick--a notoriously meticulous director--poured over each phrase before filming began. (There were probably no fewer than twenty variations of "You had best unf*ck yourself or I will unscrew your head and sh*t down your neck" written in Kubrick's notepad, right?) But that couldn't be further from the truth. Not only were about half of Hartman's rants not in the original script, but Ermey was initially only signed onto the movie technical adviser, but landed the role after asking Kubrick if he could audition for an on screen part. Ermey, having served in Vietnam as an actual drill instructor, whipped up an even longer string of insults to use on a group of background extras in order to prove to Kubrick that he was right for it. Some of that audition transcript was worked into the script, while a generous helping of further off-the-cuff vulgarity was performed on the spot during filming. All in all, the Sgt. Hartman character was expanded to twice the size that it was in the novel, The Short-Timers, which Full Metal Jacket was based on. Most of that extra screen time was self-penned by Ermey.