10 Actors Who Didn't Know They Were Being Filmed For Movies

Damien Chazelle's First Man is an especially interesting case of this, as it wasn't so much that actors Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy didn't know they were being filmed, but they didn't know they were being filmed for the movie.

Prior to principal photography, Chazelle assembled Gosling and Foy with the young actors who would play their screen sons Rick and Mark, and filmed two weeks worth of rehearsal footage centered around the actors bonding as a faux-family.

What Chazelle didn't tell the four performers is that he always intended to use the footage in the final film, as he eventually did, even replacing existing written scenes. The film's Oscar-winning editor, Tom Cross, detailed the process:

"Some of that rehearsal footage replaced scripted scenes that we had of the family, just because it felt more authentic. Those actors are amazing with their characters in the scripted scenes, but they really became those characters, and you see that in all the unscripted material we had. That's a big reason why we used a lot of that footage, because it just felt like we were flies on the wall watching real people in a documentary."

While you couldn't blame an actor for potentially being frustrated that their low-pressure rehearsal footage ended up on cinema screens around the world, the relaxed authenticity of the end result absolutely speaks for itself.