10 Actors Who Took A Ridiculously Long Time To Prepare For Iconic Roles

7. Viggo Mortensen - Platoon

Time Spent Preparing: One year You might be wondering right now where exactly Viggo Mortensen was in Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning Platoon. The answer is 'nowhere', as Mortensen - originally due to play Sgt. Elias - was replaced by Willem Dafoe just before shooting began. Mortensen is characteristically dedicated - for his Oscar-nominated Eastern Promises role, for one, he travelled alone around Russia perfecting his Siberian accent, learning Russian and Ukrainian and doing his own research by spending time with real criminal gangs - but it still must have hurt to be dismissed by Stone when he had already spent a year preparing to play Elias. According to Mortensen, he spent the 12 months reading "every paper, every book, every essay, watching every film, every documentary about Vietnam", while, he claims, Stone was shopping the project around with Mortensen's audition tape in tow. Stone then unceremoniously dropped Mortensen and, when the two crossed paths again years later, Mortensen claims Stone couldn't even remember meeting him.