10 Actors Who Paid Terrible Prices For Movie Roles

Part of the reason why Martin Sheen’s character Captain Benjamin L. Willard’s drunken breakdown during the opening scenes of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now is so brilliantly believable is because Sheen was genuinely drunk and going through a breakdown himself.

Already teetering on the edge by the time he arrived on set, Sheen’s battles with alcoholism and fragile mental state were exacerbated by the tumultuous production – which today goes down as one of the most troubled in cinema history – and by the time it came to shooting that scene he barely needed to employ his acting skills to portray the troubled Willard at all.

Towards the end of the production, Sheen would also suffer a near-fatal heart attack that further spurred on his mental breakdown and even after filming wrapped he couldn’t quite shake his character. He sank into a deep depression, briefly separated from his wife and was drinking heavily which culminated in a kerfuffle with the police that got him arrested.

It proved a turning point for Sheen, however, and he was soon on the road to recovery and sobriety so it all worked out well in the end, heart attack and breakdown notwithstanding.