10 Movie Auditions That Changed Cinema Forever

The auditions process for any high-profile Hollywood film is absolutely merciless, with hundreds or potentially even thousands of hopeful actors vying for a part that will change their lives forever. But of course, only one person can get the role in the end.

Most successful auditions don't exactly leave a hugely lasting imprint on cinema itself, though, and why would they? 

But there absolutely are some exceptions, when an actor comes to represent far more than just a mere single role.

And that's certainly the case with these 10 auditions, each of which ended up having a powerful ripple effect on Hollywood at large, believe it or not. 

Perhaps these auditions led to pioneering technological breakthroughs in the realm of blockbuster filmmaking, changed the very feat of acting itself, or influenced major artistic trends for decades.

When these actors got into these rooms and started reading their lines, nobody involved could've anticipated the impact they would have on filmmaking as a whole, across a wide gamut of genres and styles.

And above all else, watching these audition tapes back today, it's immediately clear why the filmmakers and producers involved cast who they did...

It can't be understated just how much impact Andy Serkis' successful audition for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings franchise had on the landscape of modern blockbuster cinema as we know it.

Serkis' famously animated audition for the role saw him not only show off a fully-formed version of the "Gollum voice," but he also brought the character to life on tape through his facial expressions and overall physical movements.

And so, this prompted director Peter Jackson to scrap his original plan of having Gollum be a fully CGI character with the hired actor only providing the voice. 

Appreciating the physicality that Serkis brought to the part, Jackson additionally had him appear on set in a motion capture suit, in turn giving the VFX wizards at Weta Digital a huge pool of reference material when animating Gollum's movements and expressions.

This effectively paved the way for modern performance capture as we know it, where the slightest subtleties of an actor's work on set can transpire through to the final digital creation. 

And it all goes back to Serkis' original Lord of the Rings audition, where his fully committed performance gave Peter Jackson one hell of an idea.