10 Actors Who Didn't Know They'd Been Cut
8. Robert Pattinson - Vanity Fair
Mira Nair's 2004 historical drama Vanity Fair originally cast Robert Pattinson as the older version of Sir Rawdon "Rawdy" Crawley the Younger - the son of Reese Witherspoon's protagonist - but his role ended up being cut from the final film.
Given that this was Pattinson's first major movie gig and he wasn't yet a known quantity, seemingly nobody thought to inform him that his part got the chop, and so when he attended a screening of the film, he was mystified to find his role missing. Pattinson said:
"I'm sitting there going, 'Ummm... really?' No one had told me that I had been cut out."
Pattinson's scenes did later appear on the DVD, but ultimately being cut might've been the best thing to ever happen to him, as the casting director felt so bad about it that he invited Pattinson to audition for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Pattinson ended up winning the role of Potter's Cedric Diggory, majorly raising his profile and setting him on a course to land the coveted, star-making part of Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise a few years later. The rest, as they say, is history.