10 Actors Tricked Into Doing Famous Movie Scenes

Kes tells the story of a young working class boy, by the name of Billy, who steals an infant kestrel from its nest before teaching it the art of falconry.

David Bradley, the actor playing Billy, was largely involved in training the three kestrels who helped bring Kes to life on the big screen, and was particularly attached to a bird called Hardy. Yet, in an attempt to elicit as genuine a performance as possible from the youngster, director Ken Loach told Bradley that Hardy was set to be legitimately killed, and his corpse would be used in the scene where Billy finds his companion dead in a bin.

Bradley went on to give a stirring and painfully honest performance throughout this heartbreaking scene, silently scanning his fallen feathered friend with his hands and eyes before launching an attack on the cruel step-brother responsible for its death. Loach then revealed soon after shooting that this was all merely a trick and Hardy was actually safe and sound, with a relieved Bradley exclaiming "I knew you wouldn’t kill him! I knew you wouldn’t!" when he found out the truth; The bird ultimately used in the scene was actually another which died of natural causes.

Loach also infamously played another rather cruel trick on his actors during a caning scene involving Bradley and some other schoolboys. Despite promising to call "cut" just before the cane met their knuckles, he allowed the boys to be struck for real. As the director chillingly put it:

“You can’t imitate that expression, the point at which the cane strikes the hand. So we just caned them, really.”

Not cool, Ken.