10 Actors Tricked Into Doing Famous Movie Scenes
These questionable tricks all led to eventual treats during famous movie scenes.
Acting on a set made up of hundreds of different crew members, often opposite thespians you don't know as well as you'd like to, can make even the most confident of thespians feel a tad vulnerable.
So, in order to open the door for a set of actors to produce their finest performances possible in a movie, the director helming said feature will usually go out of their way to build a degree of trust with their cast and crew. Yet, if cinema history has taught us one thing, it's that a mind behind a movie will often do everything in their power to bring their vision to the big screen, even if that means breaking that aforementioned trust to do so.
Deceiving performers by secretly altering their costumes, unexpectedly throwing actors into deeply uncomfortable situations, and outright lying to a talent for the sake of one soon-to-be immortal moment, are just a few of the ways directors have tricked stars into scenes which would later become iconic.
But, unlike the fibbing folks involved in this misleading list, we're not here to send you down the wrong path. So, here are ten actors who were deceived into making movie history.
10. Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory - Actors Not Told About The Tunnel Scene
"There's no earthly way of knowing, which direction we are going..." aren't just the lyrics mumbled by Gene Wilder during the infamous Tunnel of Terror scene which goes down in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, they were also likely the thoughts shared by the actors experiencing that traumatising boat ride with him.
Throughout much of the making of this now-iconic feature, director Mel Stuart insisted on not showing or telling the actors experiencing Wonka's world for the first time much about the factory or the mysterious figure behind it. So, on top of only being shown the colourful Chocolate Room before the shooting of the actual scene, Stuart also didn't inform his cast exactly what was incoming once they sat down for a ride down the chocolate river.
As the lights began to flicker and Wilder's improvised performance only grew in terrifying intensity, the children in particular were pretty spooked by the surreal set of events. This made for some authentic reactions when it came to the finished product, but it also made the cast wonder whether anyone would want to come and watch a movie showcasing this mad man.
According to Denise Nickerson, who played Violet in the film:
"I had not anticipated that, it was not in the script that he was going to go off on that tangent. I was completely speechless. I thought, nobody is going to come and see this movie this (Wonka character) is a nutjob. But good thing I’m not a producer, right?”