10 Actors That Totally Underprepared For A Movie Role

As Peter Jackson's ambitious journey to bring the epic trilogy of The Lord of the Rings to the big-screen got underway all those years ago, the director initially rewarded Stuart Townsend with the meaty role of Aragorn.

However, it soon became clear that Townsend was just too darn young for the role of the future King of Gondor, so a replacement in the form of Viggo Mortensen was swapped in rather late in the casting day.

After being convinced by his LOTR loving son that it was a role worth taking, though, the actor who would eventually become synonymous with the badass ranger-turned-leader-of-men arrived on set and immediately felt "unprepared", as he put it.

And with the rest of the cast having already began shooting and some of them being out in New Zealand for weeks or months at the point of his arrival, it's not hard to see why the gifted thespian felt as though he was playing some serious catch-up in those early days on set.

If that wasn't enough to deal with, Mortensen also confessed to feeling understandably "awkward" about the concept of replacing another actor for the first time, too.

Despite these early concerns, however, Viggo soon found his human-sized feet and went on to produce one of the most gripping performances the critically acclaimed series had to offer.