10 Actors Who Did Not Take Credit For Big Movie Roles
4. John Houseman - Naked Gun
The first thing the Zucker Brothers got right when they made their seminal spoof Airplane! was the casting of Leslie Nielsen. Prior to 1980, Nielsen had been a serious actor, appearing in a few straight-laced disaster films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Day of the Animals.
His self-serious presence led to some of the greatest deadpan lines of the movie, and the Zuckers looked no further than Nielsen for the lead of Frank Drebin, the bumbling detective of the short-lived series Police Squad! and later The Naked Gun.
Running with the notion that serious actors deadpan the best, they also cast the legendary John Houseman, in his final role, as a driving instructor during a car chase in Naked Gun. It was his final role before passing away, but at least he went out laughing. The is loaded with oddball cameos, mostly related to the baseball-themed plot, but Houseman's is entirely out of the blue, a strange dash of class in an otherwise hysterical car crash.