10 Insane War Movie Facts You Won't Believe Are Real
4. The Cast Of Platoon Got High To Get Into Character
Based on the director's real-life experiences of the Vietnam War, Oliver Stone's Platoon is one of the war genre's most seminal offerings. The 1986 Academy Award-winning film depicts an epic battle between good and evil set against the visceral backdrop of the Vietnam War, featuring a trio of powerhouse performances from Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger.
A remarkable fact that viewers likely don't know about Stone's masterful war outing? During a psychedelic sequence in the film where the platoon gets inebriated on drugs and alcohol in the aptly dubbed "Underworld", the cast is just as stoned as they look. Willem Dafoe disclosed in a later interview that several of the cast members decided to get in character for the trippy sequence by smoking copious amounts of marijuana beforehand.
While the iconic moment has been immortalized forever on the silver screen and lends Stone's trademark levels of authenticity to proceedings, this decision didn't end well in practice. Dafoe revealed that by the time that production had finished shooting the scene, the groggy actors had sobered up and were too far befuddled to be of any real use.