10 Actors Who Hated Their Own Movie Death Scenes

6. Yaphet Kotto - Live & Let Die

Jessica Alba death Fantastic Four
United Artists

The James Bond franchise generally tries to give its villains memorable deaths, and few are more iconic - or hilarious - than that of Live and Let Die's Dr. Kananga (Yaphet Kotto).

At the end of the film, 007 (Roger Moore) forces the antagonist to swallow a compressed gas pellet typically used in shark guns, which promptly causes Kananga's body to comically balloon up, fly out of the shark tank, and explode in mid-air.

As amusing as it is, it's insanely silly even for the standards of Moore-era Bond, and Kotto himself, a serious actor who had previously appeared on Broadway, didn't much care for such a ridiculous demise. He said:

"The way Kananga dies was a joke... The entire experience was not as rewarding as I wanted it to be."

Kotto generally didn't have a good time making the film either, saying of the script's depiction of his character:

"There were so many problems with that script... I had to dig deep in my soul and brain and come up with a level of reality that would offset the sea of stereotype crap that Tom Mankiewicz wrote that had nothing to do with the Black experience or culture.
It was the first Black Bond villain, I wanted to be original... but there was nothing I could draw on from Tom’s script. It was a trap. If I had played it the way it was written, every Black organisation in the world would have been on my case."

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