10 Actors Who Scared Themselves
7. Bob Hoskins Hallucinated Animals Terrorising Him - Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the most innovative blockbusters ever made - an ahead-of-its-time hybrid of live-action filming and animation, where director Robert Zemeckis employed innumerable practical tricks to convince audiences that its animated characters were indeed interacting with the real world.
But Zemeckis' greatest weapon all along may have been Bob Hoskins, who had the daunting task of giving the impression he was plausibly speaking to and acting around a bevy of animated characters, years before CGI characters were a commonality in Hollywood.
As a result it's not terribly surprising that the effect had a bit of a warping effect on Hoskins' own brain, to the extent that the actor became a little concerned for his own mental wellbeing:
"I had trained myself to hallucinate and in the end it screwed up my brain... I would be sitting, talking normally and suddenly a weasel would creep out of the wall at me."
Hoskins' doctor ultimately recommended that he take five months off to get himself straight, and indeed, Hoskins didn't appear in any films for the next year.
When he did return to the big screen in 1990, he quite understandably picked two frothy comedy vehicles, Heart Condition and Mermaids, that didn't demand much from his psyche.