10 Iconic Movie Villains (Almost Played By Someone Else)

For much of David Fincher's Se7en the killer, tormenting and murdering people to punish them for one of the seven deadly sins, is a shadowy figure on the sidelines. The whole story builds up to him finally meeting Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman's detectives when he shockingly turns himself in.

With all that build up, Fincher knew he had to make an interesting choice to play the killer and his first option was nothing if not out of the box.

REM frontman Michael Stipe's acting experience didn't stretch much beyond playing an ice cream man named Captain Scrummy on an episode of surrealist Nickelodeon show The Adventures Of Pete And Pete, but nevertheless Fincher thought the Losing My Religion singer would be perfect for the biblically-fixated psychotic murderer.

"They wanted someone very unexpected," Stipe explained in a 2016 interview, "And it required nothing, all I had to do was run down some hallways and look scary. There was no dialogue."

It was not to be, however, as filming clashed with the band touring their album Monster. As Stipe chose performing that Monster, the one on screen instead passed to Kevin Spacey and the dialogue-free role became positively verbose. Stipe, meanwhile, complained that switching the original ending in which his character was killed by Freeman to one in which Pitt kills Doe "made no sense".

Spacey is truly chilling as John Doe in a way that the man behind Everybody Hurts probably wouldn't have been. But at least with Stipe instead of Spacey audiences wouldn't feel the discomfort of knowing the movie villain was a real life bad guy as well.